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unidentified
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| All I knew growing up was that if I asked too many questions, if I said no to my parents, if I question any aspect of upbringing, and if I fell short of excellence, the price was going to be physical violence. | ||
|
unidentified
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Journalist, musician, and author Lee Hawkins tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to QA wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | |
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| Good morning. | ||
| It's Sunday, April 6th, 2025. | ||
| Thousands of people all over the country joined coordinated demonstrations yesterday protesting President Trump, his policies, and Trump advisor Elon Musk. | ||
| The powerful role the world's richest person is playing in Trump's administration and in American politics is our topic this morning. | ||
| How supportive are you of Elon Musk? | ||
| Our phone lines for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from. | ||
| You can also reach us on social media, or at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now, those protests were held at more than 1,200 locations all over the country, as is being reported in the Associated Press, with the headline that angry protesters from New York to Alaska assail Trump and Musk in hands-off rallies. | ||
| Going on to say, crowds of people angry about the way President Donald Trump is running the country marched and rallied in scores of American cities Saturday in the biggest day of demonstrations yet by an opposition movement trying to regain its momentum after the shock of the Republicans' first weeks in office. | ||
| So-called hands-off demonstrations were organized for more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LGBTQ plus advocates, veterans, and election activists. | ||
| The rallies appeared peaceful with no immediate reports of arrests. | ||
| Many of the signs and chants in those protests around the country were criticizing Elon Musk. | ||
| And as is reported here in Politico from last week, Musk has been everywhere. | ||
| A new poll says many Americans don't approve. | ||
| The latest national survey by Marquette University comes a day after Muskback candidate lost in Wisconsin. | ||
| This is a story from April 2nd showing that the tech billionaire running the Department of Government Efficiency has become a lightning rod in national politics with Democrats railing against Musk and Doge's potential cuts. | ||
| And a new poll finds that voters don't approve of his efforts. | ||
| A national poll by Marquette University Law School released Wednesday shows a majority of adults surveyed disapproved of Musk and distaste for his work at Doge as he plans to dramatically remake the federal government. | ||
| Let's look at some numbers from that Marquette University poll, which found that only 41 percent of those polled approved of Elon Musk's handling of Doge versus 58 percent who disapprove. | ||
| When it comes to Musk's personal favorability, just 38 percent view him favorable, 60 percent view him unfavorably. | ||
| There's another poll from Reuters and Ipsos that found 57 percent of Americans view Musk unfavorably, while only 39 percent viewed him favorably. | ||
| Now, in an interview with Fox News, Elon Musk was asked about his work with Doge and just how long he would stay with it. | ||
| You technically are a special government employee, and you're supposed to be 130 days. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you going to continue past that, or do you think that's what you're going to do? | |
| Well, I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe. | ||
| So, in that timeframe, 130 days. | ||
| And the process is a report at some point, 100 days? | ||
| Not really a report. | ||
| We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. | ||
| So, every day that passes. | ||
| Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day every day, seven days a week. | ||
| And so far, we are succeeding. | ||
| And we're going to talk to the specifics, but there obviously are Doge critics who are reading all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Obviously, lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are attacking you. | ||
| And they characterize the approach as this, fire ready, and then aim. | ||
| And how do you approach that? | ||
| How do you respond to that? | ||
| Well, I do agree that we actually want to be careful in the cuts. | ||
| So we want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. | ||
| And actually, that is our approach. | ||
| They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that. | ||
| Which is not to say that we don't make mistakes. | ||
| If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone baseball's got about 1,000. | ||
| That's impossible. | ||
| So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly and we move on. | ||
| Once again, our question this morning, how supportive are you of Elon Musk? | ||
| Our phone lines again, for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll start with Larry in Estherville, Iowa on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I think Musk is a godsend, and we want to be thankful. | |
| We got him up there working for us, and I totally support him. | ||
| Are there particular policies that he's enacted that you really support? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I just heard yesterday that they laid off another 20,000 people at IRS. | |
| Remember when Biden was going to hire another 80,000 to keep us honest? | ||
| What kind of a deal is this anyway? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me see if I can find a story about those IRS layoffs. | ||
| Yes, here we go. | ||
| This is one from ABC News about what you're referencing, that the IRS plans to cut up to 25% of its workforce in the next round of layoffs. | ||
| In doing so, the agency will eliminate its civil rights office. | ||
| The IRS started a new round of layoffs on Friday, beginning with the agency's Office of Civil Rights and Compliance, according to an email obtained by ABC News. | ||
| Overall, the agency is planning to cut nearly a quarter of its workforce with the cuts beginning Friday. | ||
| Sources familiar with the plans said. | ||
| Next up, let's go to Mike in Norwalk, Ohio, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Yes, I'm with Elon 100% and Trump. | ||
| The reason Trump was voted back in is because they compensated the theft that was just blatantly plain to see when he opened up the borders and allowed, what, $15 million to flood our country. | ||
| And all the inspector generals that were first fired, because they're incompetent, they weren't doing their job or they were being bribed. | ||
| Listen, we got a money pit in Washington. | ||
| We're going broke. | ||
| Trump's trying to fix this with Elon. | ||
| We should feel lucky that we have people that even care. | ||
| And the only reason that Elon and all of his business partners care is because they have companies here in America and they could see what was happening. | ||
| And I just cannot believe that people are protesting that our government stole from us. | ||
| Wake up, people. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Mary in Philadelphia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| I just want the people to know that we are going broke. | ||
| The country we're going broke since the Bush administration. | ||
| I mean, we had a surplus, but we applied all our tax dollars to these unconventional wars that we have in this country. | ||
| The war on terror now, the war on poverty, the war on drugs. | ||
| You know, and this has been going on for decades. | ||
| And we cannot continue to subsidize these corporations. | ||
| And instead of Elon Musk applying the system to show the major subsidies, and we're giving it to him, Elon Musk, we've been applying, giving them corporate welfare for decades. | ||
| And this is the problem. | ||
| At this point, we need to apply a higher standard deduction when people are filing their taxes. | ||
| And we need to look into a flat tax because the corporation is going to continue to take from the American people, the taxpayers. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next up is Duke in Stonington, Maine on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Duke. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| I certainly do not support Elon Musk. | ||
| I can't stand the guy. | ||
| I call him the Muskrat. | ||
| This guy is in there. | ||
| I don't even know why he's in there. | ||
| Had Trump in the beginning told and been frank with everybody and transparent as to what he had on his mind to do when he got in, then he would have never got in now. | ||
| He's lied right from the beginning. | ||
| And these guys that fly so high on these pedestals and stuff, boy, they can be knocked off that pedestal some fast. | ||
| So they don't want to forget that. | ||
| Best thing for Musk to do is pack his bags and go back to South Africa where he belongs, because in my mind, he's not one of us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Elon Musk is a U.S. citizen, but some of those criticisms of Musk is in terms of what he's doing in the government are here in The Guardian. | ||
| Elon Musk could be the Democrats' best hope. | ||
| His failure in Wisconsin could provide a model for the defeatist Democrats. | ||
| Instead of fearing him, they should make him a symbol. | ||
| This is The Guardian's Moira Donegan. | ||
| And goes on to say, the high stakes, both for his personal fortune and for the Republican Party, for which he is now one of the largest financial sponsors, led Musk to cast this Wisconsin judges race as a battle for Western civilization and the future of the world. | ||
| Democrats have not won quite so much as that in Crawford's victory, but her vote on the court will be indispensable to efforts to restore and protect women's rights and to reestablish fair elections in Wisconsin, a state where most of the congressional districts have long been gerrymandered out of competitiveness. | ||
| Her victory also offers a roadmap to other judges and politicians who may have once feared that Musk's billions meant they could not oppose him and survive an election. | ||
| Crawford's example proves they can. | ||
| Let's hear from Homer in Kansas City, Missouri on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Homer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Barely, Kimberly. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| You look fantastic today. | ||
| The last time I was on with you was with Mr. Corn. | ||
| But anyways, this is what's going to happen. | ||
| Especially with our farmers, they're just pulling the rug out from under them. | ||
| And I don't think with this guy not being able to run again, I don't know if he might just abandon them this time. | ||
| And then what's going to happen? | ||
| I'm watching our farmland being swallowed up by these corporations that are basically Chinese. | ||
| And our own senator, Mr. Schmidt, was sold more farmland than the Ozarks comprise, the Lake of the Ozarks. | ||
| So this is what I'm seeing. | ||
| But nevertheless, if you had a million dollars in your 401k last week, in two weeks, this guy has swallowed up six figures of your retirement. | ||
| Now, are you saying that's because of Elon Musk or because of President Trump? | ||
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unidentified
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It's because of both of them. | |
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| He's on a revenge tour. | ||
| This isn't about bringing back jobs to America. | ||
| He's still mad. | ||
| He's like a small child. | ||
| He's exactly like a small child. | ||
| And, you know, that's all I got to say, Kimberly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Next up is Kevin in Connecticut on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Kevin. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Would Trump, when he fired the Independent Inspector Generals and let Musk go into our secrets of our government without no security check, without no accountability, no other country would let much go into their government like this, this Trump, this Trump did, this government did. | |
| And it's just people, the people that we lost in all these layoffs, these people were good people. | ||
| They wanted to serve the country. | ||
| Now, now we need these people back. | ||
| They're not going to come back because of how we treated them. | ||
| And, you know, all this crap about Biden started a war in Ukraine. | ||
| Hey, Russia started a war in Ukraine. | ||
| Our allies, NATO, asked us to help them, which we're not doing no more. | ||
| They helped us in 9-11 wars for 20 years, but now we're turning our backs on our allies. | ||
| This country better wake up and see who's in the White House. | ||
| You know, it's a felony in the White House and look what our country's doing. | ||
| We can't call it to Social Security no more. | ||
| We had to wait in long lines. | ||
| I mean, the country is in bad shape. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| President Trump was talking with reporters on Air Force One and was asked about Elon Musk's future with the administration. | ||
| And he made these comments on Thursday. | ||
| Well, Elon is fantastic. | ||
| And I think it's, you know, he's a patriot, and I think it's a shame what they're doing with his car company and a great car. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a great car, a great product. | |
| And it tells you what a patriot he is. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| No, I mean, as long as he'd like, I like smart people, and he's a smart person. | ||
| I also like him personally. | ||
| When he endorsed me, that's when I really got to know him. | ||
| I knew him a little bit before that, but not much. | ||
| And then he endorsed me. | ||
| And it was a very strong, embracing endorsement, as we all know. | ||
| And I would say Elon will stay for a certain period of time, and then he's going to want to get back to his businesses full-time. | ||
| But he's done a fantastic job. | ||
| We found hundreds of, think of it, just hundreds of, millions of dollars of fraud and abuse and waste. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they're still going, I mean, they're going strong. | |
| They found something today that's horrible. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| So what they found, well, you'll find out very soon. | ||
| What they found is incredible. | ||
| And I give him a lot of credit. | ||
| He's got some very smart people with him. | ||
| Do you think he can fix it? | ||
| And they're working very closely with our secretaries and the people that are the heads of Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
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But do you think you would appoint him to another position once his 100%? | |
| I think Elon's great, but he also has a company to run or a number of companies to run. | ||
| That he can do this, that he can find the time. | ||
| He loves the country. | ||
| That's why he does it. | ||
| But we're in no rush. | ||
| But there'll be a point at which time Elon's going to have to leave. | ||
| President Trump there referenced the various companies of Elon Musk, and one of them, Tesla, has been struggling in particular. | ||
| A story here from the BBC: Tesla's sales plunge after Elon Musk backlash, saying Tesla's sales have plummeted to their lowest level in three years after a backlash against its boss, Elon Musk. | ||
| The electric car maker delivered almost 337,000 electric vehicles in the first three months of 2025, a 13% drop from a year ago. | ||
| Tesla's shares tumbled in early trading on Wednesday after the release of the low sales numbers. | ||
| The cars face increasing competition from Chinese firm BYD, but experts believe Musk's controversial role in the Trump administration has had an effect too. | ||
| Back to your calls on how supportive you are of Elon Musk. | ||
| We'll go to Richard in Texas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| Yes, I have a lot of comments on Elon Musk, but I'll limit them to a few. | ||
| Ron Buren, one of the greatest investment managers of all time, and made $60 billion on Elon Musk companies, called him the greatest engineer in history. | ||
| If you look at what SpaceX did, they made two flawless operations recently. | ||
| And they made a number of excellent Experiments in space that had never been done before. | ||
| And then additionally, you had Butch and SUNY were featured in the news conference in the media after they were stuck for eight months up here. | ||
| And the media tried everything in the world to get them to assign blame. | ||
| Maybe you can pull up that quick because it's very interesting. | ||
| Of what exactly? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm sorry, Richard, which story were you referencing? | |
| The Butch Wilmer Sunny return to Earth after eight months. | ||
| Ah, yes. | ||
| I'll look that up, but go ahead with your point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| They explained that the teamwork philosophy and no blame involved. | ||
| And Butch Wilmer specifically gave reasons that he didn't blame anybody and how it's an ultimate event. | ||
| By the way, that was before the recent SpaceX flight, which was amazing in itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there are several articles about the NASA astronauts who were stuck in space for nine months. | ||
| A CBS News article about them opening up about being stuck. | ||
| And in their first public comments since their dramatic return to Earth, the NASA astronauts SUNY Williams and Butch Wilmore said they were surprised by the intense focus on the mission. | ||
| And it said Wilmore specifically said he's focused on what's ahead and applying the lessons learned from his unusual mission rather than blaming any organization or anyone for what happened. | ||
| But he said both Boeing and NASA all the way up and down the chain shoulder responsibility for the outcome of the flight. | ||
| And so that's what Richard was referencing. | ||
| Let's go to Ryan in Orange, Massachusetts on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| I'm a very big supporter of Elon Musk and what he's trying to do. | ||
| And all these people that are saying that, oh, there's no oversight, there's no oversight. | ||
| Well, where are the Democrats in the House and Senate creating an oversight committee overseeing Elon Musk? | ||
| And we've been trusting bureaucrats since the 60s, overspending our tax money. | ||
| And the budget keeps going up and up and up every year. | ||
| Don't you think it's time that we get an intelligent investment guy to go come and manage the federal spending? | ||
| I mean, it's getting out of control to the point where we're going bankrupt, and they want to spend more. | ||
| And another point I wanted to bring up is spending cuts. | ||
| When the federal government actually cuts money, is that cuts in future spending or is that cuts in the budget as what it is right now? | ||
| I guess I'd like that answered, but I think Trump's trying to do the right thing, and I think Elon Musk is being viciously attacked. | ||
| He's done nothing but good for this country, and I think his efforts should be hailed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next up, we'll hear from Catherine in St. Petersburg, Florida, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just like to say I like to see some facts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You can sit here and tell me and tell me and tell me and put up numbers that don't make sense and then take them away. | ||
| But facts need to be shown to me. | ||
| And then when there's a bunch of young kids coming in and doing this, and then he goes on the Brett Baer interview and there's a bunch of old guys up there. | ||
| That's not the Dodge team he said he was bringing in there. | ||
| So I'm not chicken little. | ||
| You're not going to drop an acorn on my head and tell me the sky is falling. | ||
| I need to see some facts. | ||
| And until I see facts, I'm not going to believe anything he's telling me. | ||
| You know, he's like taking that hitchet, and I'm not liking it. | ||
| So that's not why I'm believing anything he's telling me. | ||
| And so do something good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Alan is in Michigan on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yeah, I keep hearing all these people calling in and they're talking about waste, fraud, and spending is our problems. | ||
| Well, people do not realize all the tax money is taken in in this country, nearly 80% goes to pay for three things: Medicare, Social Security, and the military. | ||
| Okay, now that leaves roughly 20% to pay for everything else. | ||
| The FDA, medical research, welfare, you name it, aid to states, aid to foreign countries, everything. | ||
| You get rid of that entire 20%. | ||
| Just get rid of all of it. | ||
| And you wouldn't have enough to pay the interest on their debt. | ||
| So it's not spending. | ||
| Okay, what it is is people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, thousands of corporations all over this country do not pay their taxes. | ||
| And it goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan, who started it. | ||
| This is our problem. | ||
| And people, if it keeps up, we're going to go bankrupt. | ||
| And the only thing left to pay the bill is your Medicare and Social Security. | ||
| Because your dear Republicans are never going to touch the military. | ||
| This is the bottom line. | ||
| We're going bankrupt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's not spending. | |
| And it's not what people think it is. | ||
| So Alan mentioned Social Security several times there. | ||
| That also came up during Corey Booker's Marathon Senate floor speech last week. | ||
| New Jersey Democratic Senator Corey Booker called out Elon Musk and Doge their work specifically when it comes to Social Security. | ||
| They tried to eliminate service by phone, saying that they wanted to require in-person visits, which is absurd for many seniors that don't have access to transportation or live in rural areas, because you know what they're doing also is that they're trying to close down many Social Security offices. | ||
| I'm going to get to the specifics of that later. | ||
| These actions are harmful enough, but they're just the beginning of what our president and Elon Musk are saying they want to do to a program that for millions of Americans, it's their only check a week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's essential for them and others, it's how they make their retirement secure. | |
| You don't protect the future by punishing the people who built this country. | ||
| You don't fix America by throwing seniors or veterans or Americans with disabilities under the bus. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's not how we do things. | |
| That's not how we should do things. | ||
| There are so many hardworking families that believed in this idea. | ||
| If I work hard all my life in America, I can make ends meet, I can raise my kids, and I can retire with dignity. | ||
|
unidentified
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Congress does have a responsibility to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. | |
| We should do more of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to do more of that. | |
| I want to help lead in that fight. | ||
| But none of us were invited to a table when it came to this. | ||
| This congressionally established program, FDR, I read, but it was Congress that established it, is now not being included in the planning or procedures to try to improve Social Security or make it more efficient or more effective. | ||
| We haven't convened hearings or task forces in a bipartisan way to find out what we can do to better serve our seniors. | ||
| Instead, lies are being proffered about Social Security making wrongful payments. | ||
| Lies are being proffered by the highest office in the land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The most richest person in the land who does not need Social Security is calling it a Ponzi scheme, telling people who are relying on it they're part of a Ponzi scheme. | |
| But remember this, Social Security is not the government's money to spend. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's the hard-earned savings of working Americans, and it belongs to Americans. | |
| The President and Elon Musk need to keep their hands off of it. | ||
| Our question this morning, how supportive are you of Elon Musk? | ||
| We'll go next to Timbo in Mountain Home, Arkansas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Timbo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd love to be the one to give Musk and Trump a cigarette and a blindfold before they face a military firing squad. | |
| Let's go to Kyle in Clearwater, Florida on our line for Democrats. | ||
| We do not like calls for violence. | ||
| Go ahead, Kyle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Definitely not on the supportive side, just since he is the world's richest man with at least hundreds of conflicts of interest with his own businesses, the tens of millions of subsidies and billions in government contracts. | ||
| I'm pretty concerned not only with the active cuts and things like Social Security with reducing offices and phone-in support, but the fact that he's in military meetings makes me really uneasy, especially knowing how important the Chinese market is for his companies. | ||
| So it's definitely on the concerned side. | ||
| Next up is Firth in Miami, Florida on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Firth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I believe there are plenty of conflicts of interest. | ||
| There is no such thing as a line item veto. | ||
| He is reneging on all of our country's already made agreements. | ||
| You're talking about President Trump here, not Elon Musk, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm talking about both of them in what they are doing. | |
| And they've just completed the largest pump and dump scheme ever in the United States history. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Sam is in Euclaire, Wisconsin on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yeah, I'm very worried about Trump. | |
| I think Trump wants way too much power. | ||
| And I think Musk wants way too much power. | ||
| And they better leave Social Security alone because that's promised to the American people, the American workers and stuff. | ||
| And I'm very concerned that both of them want way too much power. | ||
| I know we can all agree there's a lot of waste in government, but they better not go too far with cutting good, decent jobs and stuff like that, you know, right? | ||
| Now, Sam, you're in Wisconsin where Elon Musk put quite a bit of money into the judges' race. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he was smart enough to get away with it without bribing, without being a bribe. | |
| But I don't know. | ||
| He's way too kind of slick and stuff. | ||
| He made his money legally, I guess, but he's got a lot of conflicts of interest. | ||
| Why is he he doesn't need to be in military meetings? | ||
| I know that because he doesn't have any military experience. | ||
| So all the other politicians better keep Trump and Musk in check. | ||
| That's all I have to say right now about that. | ||
| Brenda is in South Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Brenda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm definitely against Elon Musk and all the cuttings of these programs. | ||
| And I think what people who want the government to save money are not understanding. | ||
| I mean, okay, let's say the fish and wildlife. | ||
| They're cutting a lot of people from that program. | ||
| And Maryland had the problem with the crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. | ||
| The fish and wildlife are the people who solved that problem. | ||
| They also restored the California condor, you know. | ||
| So, I mean, if you think about all of these things that happen that the government does at their price, the state would still have the problem. | ||
| So now you have to go out and pay a private company who's all about profits and distributions, and then they're the ones you're going to have to pay. | ||
| So the state is going to take over what the government pools its money for to help all the states. | ||
| Each state is going to have to take on that responsibility. | ||
| They want to eliminate FEMA. | ||
| North Carolina have, what, $80 billion in damage? | ||
| So if they eliminate FEMA, then does North Carolina have to save bonds or something to raise the money, sell off their state lands or something to solve that problem? | ||
| It's just going to fall on each state. | ||
| Department of Education, they're eliminating Head Start government. | ||
| So then, does the state not send their kids to Head Start? | ||
| Or do the taxpayers in each state now have to take on that responsibility? | ||
| People are not understanding that just because they eliminate the program, the problems that these programs solve don't go away. | ||
| And I wish you guys would have on. | ||
| I know you've had people from USAID on, but have people from every agency, also the food inspection people. | ||
| Let them explain why these agencies were created in the first place and tell us weekly what each agency actually does so people can understand what they're losing because I don't think they get it. | ||
| Brenda mentioned several federal agencies there, including FEMA. | ||
| There's a story in the Washington Post that ran yesterday about states being caught unprepared for Trump's threats to FEMA. | ||
| FEMA is canceling plans to award states grants to help prepare against future disasters, and federal funds given to states after disasters strike could also be in jeopardy. | ||
| Saying during Donald Trump's first presidency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched a program to break a cycle of not having preparations, awarding billions of dollars to states to repair levees, elevate flood-prone homes, and shore up drinking water systems. | ||
| The program was built on research showing it is many times less expensive to protect against future damage from natural disasters than to pay for repairs and rebuilding afterwards. | ||
| Kentucky received more than $7 million for hazard mitigation projects and upgrading power transmission lines. | ||
| FEMA is now canceling plans to award these grants for the 2024 fiscal year, according to an internal memo reviewed by the Washington Post. | ||
| As Trump's second administration looks to slash federal spending, money given to states by the federal government after disaster strikes could also be in jeopardy. | ||
| The president has said he wants to eliminate FEMA and shift responsibility for disaster response to the states, which experts said are unprepared to respond to catastrophic disasters without federal assistance. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Tracy is in California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Tracy. | ||
| Hi there, Tracy. | ||
| Can you hear us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, let's look to a couple comments we've received on social media. | ||
| Donald said on Facebook in reference to Elon Musk, I support his efforts of shaking up government. | ||
| We're in need of one. | ||
| Government has been screwing up this country's survival. | ||
| And then Sherry from Louisiana texted us and said, if you look over the stock markets years and years past, the market drops but always comes back better. | ||
| You never really lose anything unless you take money out, let it ride, be patient. | ||
| And this is in response to the stock market reactions to the tariffs, I'm guessing. | ||
| And so, again, you can message us on Facebook. | ||
| We're at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN or also on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Jesse is in Lawrenceville, Georgia on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jesse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| And can you turn down the volume on your TV, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Please go ahead with your comment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so I just want to point out two things. | |
| I was just listening to the NASA hearing on C-SPAN, and it was brought to light that a couple of Elon Musk's main stockholders in Tesla are actually in China, which is a little peculiar. | ||
| And then also, you know, Trump ran on one of his main stays of running was how he was going to take it to the billionaires and whatnot. | ||
| And then he hires a billionaire to be his right-hand man. | ||
| That just doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next up is Jerome in New York on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jerome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| How are you today? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen, it's a shame that we are here at this place in this country. | |
| But it's almost because people are just not honest. | ||
| And I'll tell you what I mean by that. | ||
| William Proxmeyer, Republican, tried way back when, you can look him up, you can search, you do your research all the time. | ||
| He was saying, look, there's a lot of waste here. | ||
| And he would go on the floor at the Congress and he would talk about all the different types of money being wasted. | ||
| And if you're really going to attack waste and government efficiency and government spending, you've got to start with the military. | ||
| You have thousands of planes in the desert doing nothing. | ||
| You have ships doing nothing. | ||
| You have wasted money all through the world with all these military bases. | ||
| So when you really sat there, if you want to attack waste, that's where you go, but they won't touch it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because people leave the military and make big money. | ||
| William Haig, I mean, Alexander Haig, for example, when he was being sworn in as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State and he was being pushed back by the Democrats, he said, why are you mad at me? | ||
| I am going to lose money. | ||
| I got to put my money in that screw and I got to freeze my assets and my investments. | ||
| And when he researched it, where was his money and his assets and investments in military spending? | ||
| So the problem is, of course, white male insecurity and the original sin of the country, racism, genocide in the East Indias, painting anybody that's non-white, and of course... | ||
| And how does this relate to Musk's involvement in the federal government, Jerome? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you repeat that again? | |
| How do you feel like this all relates to Musk's involvement in the federal government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because that's how Trump has come to power. | |
| It's not based on intellect. | ||
| It's based on emotion. | ||
| It's based on demagoguery. | ||
| He hates the people that most of the racists in this country hate. | ||
| Okay, next up is Maxwell in Culpeper, Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Maxwell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with that guy. | |
| Totally. | ||
| He said him all, but I agree with him totally. | ||
| But Elon Musk, he touched everything except what? | ||
| Military. | ||
| Guess where he gets his money from? | ||
| Military. | ||
| Until you touch the military, you're not going to save nothing in the United States of America. | ||
| That guy was completely right. | ||
| That's the only guy I can completely agree with that I've heard this morning. | ||
| This guy, that guy is, I don't know where he's from or who he's with, but he is completely right. | ||
| The military, if you don't cut the military, you won't cut nothing. | ||
| You're going to take food off people's table to make them richer. | ||
| Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Donald Trump is completely tapped out. | ||
| All Donald Trump wants power, get in the Air Force One, fly down to Florida every weekend, play golf, $3 million. | ||
| So if he goes every weekend for $3 million, $150 million a year. | ||
| But where's the cut with that at? | ||
| So we're going to cut people from food assistance. | ||
| We're going to cut. | ||
| He didn't even come back. | ||
| Maxwell, before you go on, I want to point to an article in the Associated Press. | ||
| Doge has targeted some cuts in the military. | ||
| Here's a story saying the Pentagon is cutting up to 60,000 civilian jobs. | ||
| About a third of those took voluntary resignations. | ||
| This is a story from March 18th. | ||
| Roughly 50 to 60,000 civilian jobs will be cut in the Defense Department, but fewer than 21,000 workers who took a voluntary resignation plan are leaving in the coming months. | ||
| A senior defense official told reporters to reach the goal of a 5% to 8% cut in the civilian workforce. | ||
| Excuse me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That ain't why I called. | |
| The reason I called is this right here. | ||
| The guy, he just got me all fired up for the military thing. | ||
| My thing is this: I keep hearing Republicans talk about cut, Okay, we're going to cut, But my thing is this. | ||
| Okay, if you're going to cut Social Security and you're going to cut Medicaid and then you're going to give $4.5 trillion in tax cut plus another $4.5 trillion in spending, that's $9 trillion. | ||
| So you're going to make people starve, but you're going to give more to the rich. | ||
| Where the heck does that make sense? | ||
| Okay, next up is Sandy in Palmyra, Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sandy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I don't agree with a lot of the things that are being said right now. | ||
| I think Elon Musk has given up a lot to help this country get out of the critical debt that we are in right now. | ||
| And I just feel that they're not giving him enough credit. | ||
| He's not trying to get into our political business. | ||
| He's trying to help the country be saved from Social Security being closed down, Medicare being closed down. | ||
| A lot of these programs that are actually for the elderly are being closed down because we are in such terrible debt. | ||
| How did we get into that debt? | ||
| Past political decisions. | ||
| And I think he's doing a wonderful job. | ||
| I don't think that he should be criticized as much as I've heard people criticizing him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Charles is in Washington, D.C., on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Charles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I appreciate the lady talking about running up the debt. | ||
| Donald Trump ran up the debt by giving tax breaks to the millionaires and billionaires by $3 trillion, and he wants to do it again over a 10-year period. | ||
| That's what they're trying to do now. | ||
| Take the money out of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and give it to the rich. | ||
| It's so clear. | ||
| And Elon Musk, he doesn't have a dime in this dollar. | ||
| He comes from South Africa. | ||
| He came over here with money and tried to buy elections. | ||
| Thank God for the people in Wisconsin, yay, yay, Wisconsin for doing what you did. | ||
| We need more people in the street, more people standing up to these millionaires and these billionaires who will get tax breaks on the back of people who are paid into Social Security, who need Medicaid and Medicare at this point. | ||
| Donald Trump is doing a hostile takeover, and people will die with the decisions he's making, cutting FEMA. | ||
| There's no empathy in this human being. | ||
| And I stress to say a human being, but he's a child of God like everybody else. | ||
| Say one other thing. | ||
| If you want to cut the budget and not run it up like Trump did the last time, get that straight. | ||
| He did that, along with killing almost a million people because he made bad decisions about the pandemic. | ||
| But the way you cut the budget is going to chat GPT. | ||
| Just put it in there. | ||
| They got a computer in there. | ||
| You put it in there. | ||
| What's the best way to cut the deficit? | ||
| It's around the edges with government programs and the military. | ||
| But the biggest thing is, is to tax the rich in commensurate with their salary. | ||
| Say this and get off the line. | ||
| Warren Buffett, who's made over $2 billion, he said it's okay if I gave $5 billion back in taxes. | ||
| And if the 800 richest countries paid their taxes in commensurate with how much they made with his calculation of $5 billion for the $200 billion that he made, we wouldn't have to worry about cutting taxes, cutting for the Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare. | ||
| That way, you know, they get to pay their fair share. | ||
| Let me say this. | ||
| No, Elon Musk got rich. | ||
| And the reason he got rich was because the people in the blue states who had money bought his cars and they helped make him richer than he was buying Teslas. | ||
| The people in the red states were not buying his cars. | ||
| We're the United States of America. | ||
| When the farmers needed help sending food to Africa, what'd they do? | ||
| They cut the program. | ||
| Charles, I think I understand your point. | ||
| I want to go to a clip of tape in a recent interview on Fox News. | ||
| Massachusetts Democrat Jake Aukins-Kloss was responding to a question about Elon Musk's overall efforts with Doge. | ||
| This interview took place late last month. | ||
| Do you think that the criticism by some of your Democrat colleagues just saying all Doge, everything Musk is doing is bad, or do you oppose him even attempting any of this? | ||
| When the president announced Doge right after his election, I was one of the first Democrats to say that if Elon Musk wants to work in a bipartisan, sensible fashion to eliminate waste, fraud, or abuse in the federal government, of course, I am here because government should be focused on outcomes. | ||
| It should be judicious stewards of the taxpayer dollar, and it should not get bogged down in process. | ||
| We need to be building more clean energy. | ||
| We need to be building more housing. | ||
| We need to be delivering more innovation to the American public. | ||
| But I also warned that if Elon Musk came after Social Security, we were going to fight him tooth and nail. | ||
| And lo and behold, what does he do? | ||
| He comes out with absolute lies, bold-faced lies, Riff, about Social Security, and he tries to close a Social Security office in my district in Fall River, Massachusetts. | ||
| And he is not touching Social Security. | ||
| Democrats will not let him. | ||
| Stephen is in Kansas City, Kansas, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| It's nice to wake up to a beautiful host on C-SPAN in the morning. | ||
| You know, I'm listening to all your callers, and I'm kind of worried about Alec Baldwin said where we might be headed towards civil war. | ||
| Elon Musk is a hero trying to save this country. | ||
| Your callers seem to be a lot of parasites and leeches that are holding on to the government. | ||
| This is something that needs to be done to save this country, to get rid of all the waste, fraud, and abuse from mostly Democrats and socialist fellow traveler socialists. | ||
| He's going to take us to Mars. | ||
| You know, if you don't get on board with this, you're not going to get your government. | ||
| You're not going to get your government check that you want so much. | ||
| So just kind of think about that. | ||
| You know, that America is not founded on you receiving your benefit check and it increasing manifold. | ||
| We're going to change this country. | ||
| We're going to change this country forever with tariff policy. | ||
| We're going to make it the greatest it's ever been in history. | ||
| And you're not going to believe how great we are. | ||
| And you're going to get, you either get with us or get left behind and go move to another country. | ||
| If you don't like this country, go somewhere else. | ||
| If you think it's that bad, if you think our country is that bad, then go away. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's similar comments coming from an opinion piece in the New York Post by Jonathan Turley. | ||
| Musk derangement syndrome has Dems rejecting everything they claim to stand for. | ||
| And so it says, in this age of rage, it's common for people to become the very thing they despise in others, jettisoning their most cherished values to strike out at those they hate. | ||
| Since the election, Democrats have shown that very self-destructive quality of rage in adopting anti-immigrant, anti-free speech, anti-labor, and even anti-environmental positions to get at Donald Trump or his supporters. | ||
| It consumes every part of a person. | ||
| It is addictive and it is contagious. | ||
| What these rage addicts will not admit, however, is that they like it, they need it. | ||
| And this is going on to talk about Elon Musk, where Jonathan Turley goes on to say, the left decries political violence like January 6th, but is largely silent as Teslas are set on fire and cyber trucks are covered with graffiti. | ||
| It promotes boycotts and rallies with a wink at the vandals, while other billionaires from George Soros to Mark Zuckerberg have spent big on elections for the left. | ||
| Musk is somehow uniquely evil because he gives money to Republicans. | ||
| Democrats will defend every illegal immigrant, but then meme that a foreigner, Musk, is a naturalized American, is meddling in our government. | ||
| That is in the New York Post, Jonathan Turley. | ||
| Let's go back to your comments. | ||
| John is in Memphis, Tennessee, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Yeah, I don't think that editorials like the one you just mentioned or the comments from the previous caller are very useful. | ||
| I think it falls into this destroy the country to own the libs mindset. | ||
| But I think that a lot of what Musk is doing and the Doge project is a really unfortunate overcorrection to the excesses of the administrative state during the pandemic. | ||
| Because I think people forget that he really made his big political turn when California shut his factories down and implemented all of this. | ||
| And then we come to find out in this book by political scientists Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee in COVID's wake, how our politics failed us, that the lockdowns didn't really work. | ||
| You know, you study different places and you see no tangible difference between harsh lockdowns versus like Sweden where there were virtually no lockdowns. | ||
| And when we consider how much money, how many lives, educational attainments that were lost during the lockdown, just like, oops. | ||
| And so I think people that maybe were right about the lockdowns have now said, well, we're right about everything else. | ||
| And so let's just implement our project. | ||
| And that's not doing anything, but I feel that at heart, this is a sort of overreaction to something that the administrative system got wrong. | ||
| And now we're maybe paying the price. | ||
| Sharon is in Oregon on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sharon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, and thank you for letting me speak today. | |
| I'm glad to see that people are starting to talk about facts instead of just name-calling. | ||
| And if we really look at this situation, when he lined up all those billionaires behind him on the dais when he was elected, Biden was on the wall. | ||
| And you can see how it's progressed. | ||
| First of all, these tariffs, they're really not permanent. | ||
| He even said a month and a half ago, when the stock market fell, he needed President Trump. | ||
| I'm a little nervous. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He even said, oh, it dropped 600, and the newspapers were making a big deal about it. | |
| He says, I'd like it to go down 20%. | ||
| And he does. | ||
| Because, like, Warren Buffett, he took his money out in December. | ||
| All the rich people did. | ||
| They watch it go down. | ||
| It was already bloated. | ||
| The stock market was bloated. | ||
| And in order for them, because they're the investment class, to make money, it had to go down. | ||
| So these tariffs are driving it down. | ||
| And then the second thing, they need the tax cuts. | ||
| They need those. | ||
| And he wants them permanent. | ||
| It's not 10 years this time. | ||
| They did do $3 trillion worth of debt last time. | ||
| How do you explain that if you're going to balance the budget? | ||
| By telling everybody, we have to give corporate welfare. | ||
| We have to give it to the billionaires because that's the only way we'll get out of this recession. | ||
| Then he wants to make them permanent forever. | ||
| Then you dismantle the social state, and you do. | ||
| You send it back to the states. | ||
| I want you to think about this for a second. | ||
| You can complain, like the woman said earlier, somebody's going to pay for the things that have to happen for the state and the feds. | ||
| Fed sends it back. | ||
| Now your state taxes go back up. | ||
| Now, Sharon, I want to follow up on a point that you made about the tariffs because Elon Musk did speak about that on Saturday. | ||
| He said he hoped that in the future the United States and Europe could create a very close, stronger partnership and reach a zero tariff zone. | ||
| And he made these remarks via a video link to delegates at Italy's League Parties Congress in Florence. | ||
| That the United States and Europe can establish a very close partnership. | ||
| We obviously are, there's an alliance already, but I'm hopeful that there can be a very close relationship with America and Europe. | ||
| And I'm hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move, ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America. | ||
| And that would be my, that's what I hope occurs. | ||
| Sam is in San Jose, California, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I hope you give me as much time as you did the woman before me. | |
| The basis of my call, the building block, is pull up the debt clock. | ||
| The debt clock isn't just a Republican or a Democrat situation. | ||
| It's been going on before the Vietnam War. | ||
| We're up to almost $37 trillion. | ||
| Divide that into every taxpayer. | ||
| It's insurmountable the cost. | ||
| Nowhere in the Constitution does it promise all of the governmental projects that are going on. | ||
| All the Constitution was to do was protect the United States in a defensive position. | ||
| It was not invented to support all these different things. | ||
| Social Security only came on after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which is an excellent program, came on at World War II. | ||
| Nowhere has Trump or Elon Musk said they're going to take money out of the Social Security. | ||
| Never have they said that. | ||
| Never. | ||
| But all of these liberals keep calling in and saying that's what they're going to do. | ||
| They're going to take Medicare. | ||
| They've never said that. | ||
| And plus, I'd like to see the resumes of all these people putting Elon Musk down. | ||
| I'd like to see their resumes and see what basis do they have knowledge smarter than that guy that he can land a missile back on earth. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He invents cars. | ||
| He didn't steal money. | ||
| He invented things that paid him this money. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Good man. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Ken is in Washington, D.C. on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| That was perfect timing to follow up someone that probably spent a lot of summer schools in summer school. | ||
| Look, when Elon Musk sends a rocket up, it typically comes down in pieces. | ||
| If you would please be so kind as to read this Newsweek article that was just recently posted about the amount of contracts he has just, Elon Musk, has just negotiated with the Pentagon. | ||
| So, it's such an easy scheme to look at, but you cut American jobs and then you hire his people. | ||
| Now, let's just look at the resume here. | ||
| Ken, just very quickly, just since you asked, the Newsweek article I'm guessing you're referencing has a headline: Elon Musk is inking a multi-billion dollar Pentagon deal amid Doge cuts. | ||
| Billionaire Elon Musk SpaceX and United Launch Services, a joint venture between Joet Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has gained a multi-billion dollar Pentagon contract for U.S. Space Fork Space Force rocket launches on Friday. | ||
| The projected contract values are approximately $5.92 billion for SpaceX, $5.37 billion for United Launch Services, and $2.39 billion for Blue Origin. | ||
| Guessing that's what you're referencing, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you guessed right. | |
| And that's not an April Fool's joke the last time I checked. | ||
| But when someone says how often they're proud of this man and they trust these people, typically, as a couple of callers referenced earlier, they go based on emotions, not on actually thinking about it. | ||
| So what they do is they look at their resume. | ||
| So if we look at the current president's resume, well, he's a convicted rapist. | ||
| He's been, he's both were bankrupt. | ||
| He's not a convicted rapist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's that. | |
| Oh, he's not. | ||
| That's not what the court said? | ||
| No, he is. | ||
| Are you sure of it? | ||
| He was convicted of other crimes, but I'm going to let you finish your point because we have to wrap up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Hold on one moment, please. | ||
| I'll finish. | ||
| I promise I'm done in a couple of seconds. | ||
| Nevertheless, he's a convicted felon. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| And we know that he's been impeached and so on and so forth. | ||
| Now, Elon Musk is born and raised in Praytor, South Africa. | ||
| So we know he does not have poor people, and particularly black people, best interests in mind. | ||
| And Doge is actually going after C-SPAN. | ||
| So when they go for your job, your smile will disappear. | ||
| Have a great day, love. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, that's all the time that we have for this segment. | ||
| Up next on Washington Journal, Henry Olson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center will join us to discuss Trump's agenda, tariffs, Elon Musk's future, and the political news of the day. | ||
| And then later, Center for Election Innovation and Research founder David Becker will discuss President Trump's executive order requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and Senator in session. | |
| The House plans to take up the revised Republicans 2025 budget resolution following its passage by the Senate. | ||
| Also, Jamison Greer, the United States Trade Representative, testifies on the president's agenda after he imposed tariffs on several U.S. partners. | ||
| First, on Tuesday, before the Senate Finance Committee, and then on Wednesday before the House Ways and Means Committee. | ||
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| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
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| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
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| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
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|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Henry Olson, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and also the host of the Beyond the Polls podcast. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks for having me back, really? | |
| So you have a piece in Unheard about Trump is neglecting moderates. | ||
| Harsh Partisanship Hurts President. | ||
| And in it, you wrote that Trump seems to be making his predecessors' mistakes, adding that, quote, the real danger to his legacy lies in his own temptation to ignore the national center in favor of the most hardcore elements of his base. | ||
| What policies are you referring to? | ||
|
unidentified
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And what does the U.S. political center want? | |
| Well, let's start with the second question first. | ||
| What the political center wants is toning down of the division in the country. | ||
| They want controlling inflation, bringing it back to what it was before the bump up in the Biden administration. | ||
| They want controlling of the borders. | ||
| And they want toning down of the global conflict. | ||
| And that's what gave Trump his majority, is that he said, I'm going to control the border. | ||
| I'm going to get the economy moving again. | ||
| I'm going to bring peace to Ukraine. | ||
| And he's moving on those, but he's moving on a lot of other things that the center doesn't care about or they don't like. | ||
| You know, you've got tariffs may excite the mega base, but they're not what the Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley, who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but switched to Donald Trump this time wanted. | ||
| He's talking about cutting out the Department of Education, which is a conservative thing for 40 years, but it's not what the moderates want. | ||
| Annexing Greenland and making Canada the 51st state people just kind of wonder why are we talking about that? | ||
| And those are the sorts of things that are not central to his election, not central to his victory. | ||
| And when he pursues them, people who were responsible for that wonder, is he listening to us? | ||
| You know, you mentioned the tariffs, which were such big news over the past week, obviously had a massive effect on the markets. | ||
| Let's look through some of what these tariffs are in terms of Trump's tariff plan. | ||
| 10% tariffs on nearly all imports. | ||
| That was supposed to take effect Saturday. | ||
| Higher reciprocal tariffs for China, 34%, 24% for Japan and the EU, 20% among other countries that he considers bad actors on trade, and those are going to be taking effect next Wednesday. | ||
| 25% tariffs on imported vehicle that went imported vehicles that went into effect on April 3rd. | ||
|
unidentified
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25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. | |
| That went into effect in March. | ||
| 20% taxes on Chinese imports. | ||
| Those were previously announced in March, which means that China now faces a total tariff rate of 54%. | ||
| There's also an Ipsos and Reuters poll that shows 57%, including one in three Republicans, say that these tariff policies have been unsteady. | ||
|
unidentified
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70% of people believe that tariffs will push prices higher. | |
| 41% believe Trump's economic policies will play off in the long run. | ||
| Okay, that's a lot of data there, but the polls are showing that a majority of the public see these policies as unsteady and inflationary. | ||
| So how will this work in terms of Trump's promises to lower prices? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in the short term, it won't work. | |
| That's the thing. | ||
| And I think what Trump has to do is be honest with the American people, that the tariffs are meant to correct a three-decade shift of manufacturing and semi-skilled jobs to other countries, and that has devastated some parts of the country, hence why the upper Middle West has moved dramatically to the right, because that's where a lot of manufacturing had been located. | ||
| And the idea is that you create an incentive through the high tariffs for manufacturers to come back to America. | ||
| Can't happen overnight. | ||
| And so in the short term, what will happen is people will keep buying imported goods and prices will go up. | ||
| But in the long term, what's supposed to happen is that manufacturers get the message. | ||
| They start bringing jobs home overseas. | ||
| People get jobs. | ||
|
unidentified
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They are able to afford more. | |
| And the price rises stop. | ||
| It's a short-term incentive to get jobs back to America. | ||
| If Trump can explain that and say it'll take a few years to work, but be patient with me. | ||
| That's what Ronald Reagan did. | ||
| First two years of Reaganomics, 11% unemployment. | ||
| Reagan had a 37% job approval. | ||
| 1984, the economy is roaring back. | ||
| Inflation's been crushing. | ||
| He wins by 19 points. | ||
| That's the Trump scenario. | ||
| He needs to imitate the GIPR. | ||
| The President was leaving the White House on Thursday and responded to some questions about his tariff policy and the impacts of it. | ||
| Let's listen to what he had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's going very well. | |
| It was an operation, like when a patient gets operated on, and it's a big thing. | ||
| I said this would exactly be the way it is. | ||
| We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country, and we've never seen anything like it. | ||
| The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see is there any way they can make a deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They've taken advantage of us for many, many years. | |
| For many years, we've been at the wrong side of the ball. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable. | ||
| The thing that people have to talk about, we're up almost to $7 trillion of investment coming into our country. | ||
| And you'll see how it's going to turn out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Our country's going to boom. | |
| Do you think the President's being successful at sort of conveying that message that you were just talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's selling too much hope too quickly, is that, yeah, there's an influx of investment, but in the context of a $30 trillion annual or $27 trillion annual economy, it takes many multiples for a dollar of GDP in capital investment to produce that. | |
| It's going to take years for jobs to come back. | ||
| And the short-term effect is going to be rising prices, job cuts, and declines in stock prices. | ||
| The long-term effect, if people do move the manufacturing and other jobs back to the United States, is going to be a reversal of all that. | ||
| And it'll be a lot better if the theory works. | ||
| But it's not going to happen overnight. | ||
| And I think the president is selling himself short and doing a disservice to his program when he implies that this is all gain and no pain. | ||
| And the Democrats are kind of relying on this and public backlash to it. | ||
| Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said that President Trump's tariffs would walk the U.S. into a recession. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's listen. | |
| The President made one of the dumbest decisions in history, one that will negatively impact every single American family, every single one. | ||
| He's walking us into the dumbest and most avoidable recession probably in history. | ||
| And let's call the Trump tariff tax for what they really are, a huge tax hike on American families. | ||
| And not just any tax hike. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-uh. | |
| J.P. Morgan called it, quote, the equivalent to the largest tax increase in 1968, since 1968. | ||
| Here's what Bloomberg said. | ||
| Quote, roughly $2 trillion was erased from the S ⁇ P 500 at the start of U.S. trading on Thursday amid worries that President Donald Trump's sweeping new round of tariffs could plunge the economy into a recession. | ||
| And it claims more than 80 percent of the companies in the SMP were trading lower. | ||
| Stock market has plummeted. | ||
| Retirement savings are tanking. | ||
| Consumer confidence is falling. | ||
| Consumer expectations for the future are historically low. | ||
| Companies are already announcing layoffs. | ||
| I saw Stellantis just knocked off who's going to fire 800 people, lay them off. | ||
| All for these Trump tariff tax. | ||
| All for that, so they can have more money to reduce taxes on the billionaires. | ||
| The average American family is going to pay more for everything, for food, for gas, for cars, for groceries, for clothing, for beer, for you name it. | ||
|
unidentified
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It makes no sense. | |
| And the bottom line is that they're not fighting for American families. | ||
| They're just aiding and abetting what they're doing and making it even worse with the Trump tariff tax. | ||
| Reuters reports that only 37 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy. | ||
| Only 30 percent approve of his approach to addressing the cost of living. | ||
| You heard Schumer there trying to create an argument that I'm guessing they'll hope will sustain the Democrats to the midterms. | ||
| There were big protests against the President yesterday. | ||
| How well are these arguments landing, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
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They're not landing yet. | |
| The number to look at is Trump's overall job approval rating, and it remains in the Real Clear Politics average about at 47.5 percent, which for Trump is a high number. | ||
| It is comparable to what he had when he was elected. | ||
| So if the election were held today, Republicans would win and Trump would be elected against his normal, you know, a Democratic challenger. | ||
| The question is, where is it going to be in 18 months? | ||
| And the question in 18 months is going to be how bad does the economy react to this and what else is going on in the world. | ||
| We can't know those things. | ||
| But the Democrats have a solid argument. | ||
| They're going to point to the price increases. | ||
| Prices will go up. | ||
| That's the whole point of tariffs, is you raise the prices on things from outside this country, and that gives an incentive for manufacturers to move back to this country, and that once they do that, American jobs and American wages will make for a prosperous country, and the price rises will stop, because the goods produced here would then no longer be subject to the tariffs. | ||
| It also incentivizes American consumers to purchase American-made products over the years. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right, which is something to the extent that there are American-made products that are available. | |
| But that's the thing, is that when you have this big wedge, there's a big incentive for people to look to buy American and for producers to provide American. | ||
| And the sooner that happens, the more price hikes will go away in the short term, and jobs and wages will go up in the long term. | ||
| We're going to be taking your calls with questions for Henry Olson. | ||
| Our phone line for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to the calls, in our last segment, we were talking about how people feel about the role of Elon Musk in government. | ||
| And there's a Politico magazine article that came out about a week or so ago, actually just a couple days ago, that Trump tells his inner circle that Musk will leave soon. | ||
| I'd love to hear your take on Musk's role in the government, his current standing, especially following the outcome of that Wisconsin Supreme Court race. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think Musk's standing is still strong. | |
| Obviously, you take a look at polls, and approval of Elon Musk is below approval of Donald Trump, but it's not really rebounding yet to Republicans. | ||
| I mean, what happened in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, I wrote some articles about that, is the same sort of thing that's been happening in Wisconsin for a while, which is that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are likelier to turn out than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. | ||
| And abortion is on the ballot. | ||
| That whenever you have one of these races, one candidate says, I'll protect abortion rights. | ||
| And we know that there are a number of Trump-leaning and Republican-leaning Republicans who are pro-abortion rights. | ||
| And what they will do is when it's not a partisan race, they'll vote for the pro-abortion rights candidate or the ballot measure. | ||
| But when it's a partisan race, they come back home to the Republican Party. | ||
| And so I don't think that Musk is damaging the Republican brand. | ||
| I don't think he's damaging the president. | ||
| I do think he'll leave sometime in the next few months simply because he's running multiple companies and he needs to pay attention to Tesla and SpaceX and all the other things. | ||
| But he'll still be a very influential advisor and a serious player. | ||
| I'd like to follow up on this piece that you did write about this. | ||
| Don't be fooled by the special elections. | ||
| Democrats are still in trouble. | ||
| And in this piece, you make a very key argument about who turns out to different elections, because we saw a very narrow win for Republicans in Florida, much narrower than Republicans expected, given the dynamics of that area, and then the win in Wisconsin. | ||
| I wonder if you could elaborate on that point that you made here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What we've known in the Trump era, this goes all the way back to 2017, is that Democrats are so enraged at what's going on is that they will turn out for almost anything. | |
| And the lower the turnout is as a percentage of registered voters, the more Democrats outperform. | ||
| There was a special election in 2017 in South Carolina, which was a huge Republican seat. | ||
| Republican won by only a few points. | ||
| Fast forward to the rematch between the two candidates in 2018, and the Republican dispatched the person, the Democrat, by the normal margin. | ||
| In other words, when Republicans turned out and it wasn't an ultra-low special election, the Republican won by expected margin. | ||
| That's what was going on in Florida, that the New York Times was publishing statistics real time saying how many more registered Republicans were voting than registered Democrats, and it was much lower. | ||
| The Republican advantage was much lower than it was in a general election, and the turnout was much lower. | ||
| So I understand why a party that is at its lowest approval rating in 100 years, the Democratic Party, that is a fact from various polls, that fewer people approve of the Democratic Party than have approved of it in any polling in history. | ||
| I understand why they'd want to look at an optimistic scenario, but they shouldn't overread into this. | ||
| The basic fact is Donald Trump remains popular enough that in a midterm election, if the election were held today, Republicans would win. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We have a question on X from Mimi who asks, how long will it take to bring companies back to America? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It'll depend on the firm. | |
| It'll depend on the type of good. | ||
| In some cases, it'll take many years. | ||
| You know, it takes years. | ||
| If you can't just ramp up an existing plant and add production lines or have a small build out, it'll take many years to build the large factories. | ||
| But you'll begin to start to see the start of that. | ||
| is that if you're building a factory in the United States, it may not be the factory jobs that's getting created, but the construction jobs are being created. | ||
| So you'll begin to, if the tariffs work as the theory holds, sometime in the third year of Trump's presidency, which is say 2027, you will start to see a really noticeable construction boom, which will start to bring construction jobs back. | ||
| And you will have already seen some shifting of production to American firms in places that don't need the large investment. | ||
| There are some economists who argue that there are certain industries that will never come back to the United States because there's just no competitive advantage even with tariffs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Often the textile industry is being used as an example. | |
| Do you see any way that these tariffs could incentivize, say, textile and clothing manufacturing to come back to the U.S.? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, I'm going to defer to the people who study that field, you know, which is to say every business is different. | |
| Every type of good is different. | ||
| I don't think you should expect that every business that left the United States is going to come back. | ||
| But the American consumer has been spending and sending abroad $1.3 trillion a year in our net trade deficit. | ||
| That's American money that goes to support jobs primarily in other countries. | ||
| Then you have a few hundred billion dollars of remittances, people who are working here but are sending the money home to other countries. | ||
| 18% of the GDP in Guatemala is remittances from people who are Guatemalans living outside the country. | ||
| The American consumer has a lot of money it's been spending elsewhere. | ||
| People will want to keep that money in their business. | ||
| That means they have a big incentive to move here. | ||
| And the more they move here, the more of that $1.3 to $1.6 trillion a year that's been going out of the country will stay in the country. | ||
| This is the Trump theory. | ||
| And we're on a big riverboat gamble to see if it works. | ||
| But that's the theory. | ||
| And if supply-side economics insight that incentives matter is true, well, a 25% or a 54% wedge in domestic versus imported goods, that's bigger than any tax cut on marginal rates that has ever been pushed forward. | ||
| If incentives matter, manufacturers will come home. | ||
| Let's hear from Linda in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, can you hear me? | |
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| I should say I'm a moderate Democrat, and I don't like extremes at all, one way or the other. | ||
| But my question for your guest is, has Mr. Trump considered the high wages that American workers make, the unions and so forth, are here. | ||
| And the American worker has high wages compared to the rest of the world and high benefits compared to the rest of the world. | ||
| And I don't see how they're going to bring all these manufacturing jobs back when they have to consider that it's not going to pay the companies to move back into the United States. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's just a cost calculus, which is to say that are the tariffs high enough to make up for that wage differential. | ||
| In some businesses, it won't be. | ||
| In many others, it will be. | ||
| Again, it's going to be a business-by-business decision. | ||
| But I think that for a lot of companies, they will decide that a 25 or 35, or again, with China, 54% tariff. | ||
| You know, a 54% tariff on the price is a huge premium to pay. | ||
| And American wages may very well be the thing that they're willing to pay to avoid a 54% tax on bringing something into the country. | ||
| Let's hear next from Dave in Lynchburg, Virginia on our line for independence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| From everything that I hear you saying, it sounds like a crapshoot. | ||
| And in the meantime, you know, the stock market crashes, people that have 401ks that they're living off of and being supplemented by are going down. | ||
| People's retirements are being, you know, dried up. | ||
| And the possibility of Social Security going down or going away is very real. | ||
| So, I mean, what about the average person? | ||
| What about the person that just retired a year or so ago, that only has a certain amount of money, that has bills that keep going up, that has health care at every turn? | ||
| That's a whole nother circumstance that nobody's talking about anymore. | ||
| Health care. | ||
| Listen to Bernie. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| Health care is screwing people at every turn. | ||
| We're going to have people rioting in the streets and more people are going to start getting shot in the streets for the people's dissatisfaction for how the upper class is treating the lower class. | ||
| And again, Trump could say, oh, yeah, it's going to take some time. | ||
| He's going to wait it out. | ||
| Well, there's some people that can't wait it out. | ||
| There's some people that are living Social Security check to Social Security check. | ||
| And the little guy is getting screwed. | ||
| So Dave, let's let Mr. Olson respond to some of these points that you've raised. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, with respect to Social Security, the President's been very clear the Social Security benefits are not going to be cut. | |
| It's not going away. | ||
| There are Republicans who would like to cut Social Security. | ||
| Trump has said that he's not going to do it. | ||
| And that's been something he's been very consistent on throughout his tenure in politics, going back to when he first was running in 2016. | ||
| But the point on 401ks is a very real point, is that I do expect the stock market to decline on average. | ||
| Some companies will go up. | ||
| Some companies will go down. | ||
| It all depends on their exposure to these tariffs. | ||
| But if you're basically a broadly invested investor in index funds, you should expect to see your 401k balances decline over the next year and a half. | ||
| But it's not going to be permanent if the Trump theory is correct. | ||
| What will happen is the same thing that happened with Ronald Reagan, that the stock market declined 30, 35, 40 percent, and then the tax cuts and the deregulation took hold and the country came roaring back. | ||
| And within four years, your balance was higher and was up. | ||
| And that's when the great 40-year bull market started. | ||
| So yes, there will be some short-term pain, and the president is selling himself short if he's not telling people that. | ||
| If the Trump theory is right, if incentives matter, enough jobs will come back that we will have a booming economy by years three and four of the Trump administration. | ||
| And your balances in the stock market will be back. | ||
| And meanwhile, the social safety set's not going to be cut. | ||
| Medicare is not going to be cut. | ||
| The president's clear on that. | ||
| Social security is not going to be cut. | ||
| The president's clear on that. | ||
| He doesn't want to cut Medicaid, unlike, again, some congressional Republicans. | ||
| So I think the social safety net will be robust. | ||
| And if the president's theory is right, we will come back much stronger at the end of his term than we will be in the middle of a storm. | ||
| I'd like to switch to a national security topic. | ||
| Axios and others are reporting that 9-11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office last week and pressed President Trump to fire certain National Security Council staffers. | ||
| And then shortly thereafter, several members of the National Security Council were fired. | ||
| Now, President Trump was asked about this on Air Force One and his relationship with Laura Loomer. | ||
| So let's listen to what the president said, and then I'd love to get your thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell us a little bit about your meeting with Laura Loomer and Mike Wolves today and how that came out now. | |
| So Laura Loomer is a very good patriot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She is a very strong person. | |
| And I saw her yesterday for a little while. | ||
| She has read, she makes recommendations of things and people. | ||
| And sometimes I listen to those recommendations like I do with everybody. | ||
| I listen to everybody and then I make a decision. | ||
| But I saw her yesterday. | ||
| She was at the ceremony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she'll always have something to say, usually very constructive. | |
| What did she recommend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
She recommended certain people for jobs. | |
| Adding to the administration, not hiring? | ||
| Well, she'll recommend that too. | ||
| Yesterday she recommended some people for jobs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did she have anything to do with the NSC aides who were ousted? | |
| No, it doesn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you know how many, sir? | |
| Do you know how many from the NSC? | ||
| How many? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it five, a dozen? | |
| I really don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who does Loomer? | |
| There were a couple that actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who did Laura recommend hiring? | |
| Well, I don't want to say that, but she's recommended some good people over the years. | ||
| She's been in the party a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's done a good job. | |
| I know that was a little bit challenging to hear, but the gist of it was the president said that he listens to lots of people and takes input and makes his own decisions. | ||
| But do you think that the president should be taking advice and counsel from people like Laura Loomer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would not have Laura Loomer in my circle. | |
| She is somebody who has advanced a number of ideas, not just on 9-11, that are, to put it charitably, out there. | ||
| That said, apparently in this case, it wasn't a crazy theory. | ||
| She apparently had social media posts that showed that some people in the National Security staff had been strongly opposed to President Trump. | ||
| And the president has the right to have people he deems as loyalists. | ||
| So in this case, she might have provided him with information that had escaped the veterans and the personnel office. | ||
| Can't comment on that because nobody's being specific about what was said about each person. | ||
| But as a general matter, he should listen to a lot of people, but he shouldn't listen to everyone. | ||
| And Laura Loomer is one person who would probably be in his interest not to have in his circle. | ||
| Jeff is in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, how you doing, guys? | |
| I just wanted to remind this gentleman that, you know, these are executive orders that are being done. | ||
| The Republicans, again, like everybody said, they have the House, they have the Senate, they got the presidency. | ||
| Why don't they make it a law if they feel so strong about it? | ||
| Because in four years, there's going to be a Democratic president, and they're going to just do the same thing that Trump did here and just get rid of the last president's executive orders and then make their own. | ||
| And, you know, on top of that, Elon Musk did not invent the electric car. | ||
| He did not invent the rocket. | ||
| And furthermore, no Fortune 500 company would ever base a business plan on one man's theory. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| What do you mean one man's theory? | ||
| You're talking about President Trump's tariff strategy or something else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm talking about Trump's tariff strategy. | |
| Yeah, it's not one man. | ||
| It's a group of billionaires that got together. | ||
| And, you know, obviously, you know, if I was a billionaire and I could, you know, get in a president's pocket for, you know, more money in mine through tax relief, which they don't need. | ||
| They need to contribute their fair share, just like everybody else does. | ||
| I'll let you respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think with respect to the executive orders, that is an important point, is that executive orders can be revoked. | ||
| Whether there'll be a Democratic president in four years is something that I can't know, and I don't think anyone can know, but it's certainly a strong possibility. | ||
| It would behoove both parties to legislate more and order less. | ||
| Certainly, Biden had to issue a lot of executive orders, particularly with respect to the border, and these are things that Trump is undoing. | ||
| And this creates some degree of uncertainty, but it also denigrates Congress, that Congress is the elected representatives of the people. | ||
| They should be making these decisions. | ||
| And we will see over the next couple of years what the Supreme Court says. | ||
| All of these or many of these executive orders are going to be challenged as being outside the authority of the president. | ||
| I don't think he's going to win all of those cases. | ||
| He may not even win a majority of those cases. | ||
| And if he doesn't, what it means is that future presidents would be barred from doing similar things because the Supreme Court would be saying this is Congress's role. | ||
| Congress has to act. | ||
| So we'll see over the next few years what is the scope of the power of the presidency and to what extent will the next president, well, to what extent will Trump be able to get away with what he's doing constitutionally? | ||
| And to what extent can the next president have similar powers? | ||
| We don't know where the playing field is going to lie by 2028. | ||
| We are seeing some efforts by Congress to potentially rein in President Trump, particularly when it comes to tariffs. | ||
| This is a story in Politico, but it's been elsewhere, about the bipartisan Senate bill that would reinstate Congress's authority to review tariffs. | ||
| And now, as this story reports, House Republicans are joining in. | ||
| Nebraska Representative Don Bacon said he plans to introduce a companion bill to the bipartisan Senate legislation aimed at reclaiming Congress's authority over tariffs, becoming the first House Republican to openly challenge the powers President Donald Trump is using to launch a massive global trade war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you think are the prospects for this piece of legislation? | |
| Well, just being very mechanical about it, it has to break a filibuster, which means it needs 60 votes in the Senate, which means at least 13 Republicans would need to join with all 47 Democrats. | ||
| It would probably require a two-thirds vote because as a law, President Trump would veto it, I'm sure. | ||
| So the question is, can they get two-thirds? | ||
| I don't think they can at this point. | ||
| If we're talking about a worst-case scenario and the economy does go into a deep recession, as some economists and Senator Schumer said, you may very well have enough Republicans say enough is enough by 2026 to do something like this. | ||
| But the courts may force it anyway, which is to say there is at least one case already been filed that says that Trump does not have the authority to do this, and it cites recent Supreme Court decisions that rein in executive power. | ||
| Could very well be that the court's three liberals plus two of the six conservatives agree with that and say the president doesn't have the authority to use an obscure emergency act that's never been used to impose tariffs to upend the global trading order. | ||
| That is, in fact, what the president has done. | ||
| And it may very well be that the Supreme Court does Congress's job for it in the sense that it says, no, the Constitution requires that you have the authority over things like this, and now it's your right to exercise it. | ||
| So one way or another, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a congressional matter by 2027. | ||
| We have a question from Steve in Tampa, Florida that we received via text. | ||
| And Steve says, Mr. Olson has a very rational approach to the Trump presidency. | ||
| My contention is that no one has had enough confidence to make the tough decisions that will over time dramatically help to save the financial and economic structure of the United States. | ||
| As a country, we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem, which is what Trump is addressing in multiple ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your thoughts? | |
| He is addressing the spending issue in multiple ways. | ||
| That's what Doge is trying to do. | ||
| I suspect when the President's budget comes down, you're going to see a proposal for a dramatic decrease in discretionary spending. | ||
| You know, Pete Hegseth is trying to push money out of non-hard power elements of the defense budget, you know, things that support things that don't actually amplify our firepower into those other areas so you can get more bang for the buck. | ||
| I think the president is going to try and tackle the spending issue. | ||
| But I also have to say these tariffs are taxes. | ||
| And he talks about $400 billion perhaps being raised by them. | ||
| That's a $400 billion increase in revenue in one year. | ||
| That would be about a quarter of our budget deficit. | ||
| And that's going to come out of Americans' pocketbooks. | ||
| It's going to come out of consumers. | ||
| It's going to come out of companies. | ||
| It's going to come out of investors. | ||
| And you have to say he's trying to deal with the spending issue, but tariffs are revenue raisers, and there's a lot of revenue that's going to be coming in because of the tariffs in the short term. | ||
| Justin is in Sabatstol. | ||
| I'm probably mispronouncing that. | ||
| California on our line for independence. | ||
| Justin, how do you say the name of your town? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sebastopol. | |
| Sebastopol, thank you. | ||
| Go ahead with your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you. | |
| Well, I have a bunch of questions, but I'll narrow it down to two. | ||
| The first one is, I read that products, it has to do with the NAFTA treaties, products that were already covered by NAFTA would not be tariffed. | ||
| And I don't quite understand that. | ||
| I thought NAFTA covered everything between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. | ||
| So that's, if you can help me to understand how that works, that's number one. | ||
| Number two is that Trump has said Europe has huge tariffs on American products and it's unfair. | ||
| Donald Trump says a lot of things. | ||
| I don't believe anything he says. | ||
| I don't think he's restricted to the truth. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| And is it country by country? | ||
| Is it between the U.S. and the European Union? | ||
| What were the tariffs like between us and Europe? | ||
| Were they entirely one-sided? | ||
| Could you help me to understand that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| With respect to the USMCA, the current iteration of NAFTA, not every good is covered by that. | ||
| Most goods or services are, but for example, Canada retains certain agricultural practices that have the effect of disadvantaging American agricultural exports to that country. | ||
| So that's what this refers to, is that most things were made tariff-free or low tariff with respect to U.S., Canada, and Mexico, but not everything. | ||
| So that's what that refers to. | ||
| With respect to Europe, there is a unified tariff regulation in the EU. | ||
| That is something that the countries gave up. | ||
| But there are also non-tariff barriers that, for example, much American agriculture is kept out under regulations that ban or highly regulate the importation of genetically modified food, which means that if you use modern science to create a new hybrid corn, you can't necessarily import that or meat that eat genetically modified corn. | ||
| And that is meant to protect European agriculture. | ||
| And there are also some tariff barriers depending on the different goods. | ||
| I understand, but I can be corrected on this, that there's higher tariffs on cars coming from the United States into the European Union than vice versa. | ||
| So that's what Trump is referring to, is that we don't have a free trade agreement with the EU. | ||
| We've never had a free trade agreement with the EU that's governed by World Trade Organization rules. | ||
| So there are still non-tariff and tariff barriers that the EU has levied on the United States, and Trump's taking aim at those. | ||
| But many people have taken issues with the specific numbers that the President cited in his Rose Garden speech in terms of the tariffs he was attributing that other countries have on us. | ||
| There's a story here in CNBC that the tariff rates Trump ascribes to other countries are vastly higher than world trade data shows. | ||
| A Cato Institute report based on the World Trade Organization data said the trade-weighted average tariff rates imposed by most countries are much lower than what the Trump administration said. | ||
| For example, the administration said China charges the U.S. a tariff of 67 percent. | ||
| The Cato report said China's 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 3 percent. | ||
| So how do you think people should make sense of what the president is saying about trade rates, tariff rates and trade compared to what the data is showing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, obviously you have to follow the data. | |
| One of the things we know is that the president's advisors have argued that European and other countries' value-added tax are effectively tariffs. | ||
| That's not quite accurate. | ||
| But there are a lot of non-tariff barriers that have a dramatic effect that are in addition to whatever tariffs are levied. | ||
| We actually have a question about this from Cliff in Palmetto, Florida. | ||
| Can you speak more about non-tariff barriers that other nations put on products we try to export? | ||
| And should Trump put more of those on imported products? | ||
| Maybe it will be less publicly spoken about and less anguish in the aid population. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, the genetically modified food is an example of a non-tariff barrier. | |
| They don't put a price on the food. | ||
| They just say it's our policy to not encourage that sort of food. | ||
| And so consequently, you face a barrier in importing it, which means you don't have American beef that's exported to Europe. | ||
| Instead, you have other countries' beef or domestically produced beef. | ||
| You have subsidies. | ||
| The subsidies are not a legal barrier to American imports, but they allow the domestic companies to underprice Americans because they're getting subsidized by the government. | ||
| Again, massive subsidies for agriculture in the European Union makes otherwise uncompetitive on a market basis producers competitive once they can shift their overcosts to the European taxpayer. | ||
| Those are two examples, and there are many, many other examples throughout the world that you can take a look at. | ||
| And yes, it could very well be that that should be an avenue for the president to look at as well. | ||
| Sal is in New Jersey on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Sal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was just listening to Mr. Olson. | ||
| He makes a lot of sense to me. | ||
| I just was curious, how come nobody's talking about all these states, Democrats' sanctuary states, New York and Pennsylvania, all the money it's costing, California, all these states, | ||
| the money it's costing them, that before the tariff even went into effect with President Trump, all the deficit, all the money that they cost to keep the illegal immigrants here, house them, snap program, Medicaid. | ||
| How come they ain't nobody talking about all these Democrats, Chuck Schumer, and everybody? | ||
| How come nobody's talking about how much money that's costing our economy with all these states doing these kind of things? | ||
| Certainly the refugees and the illegal immigrants who came in, particularly over the last four years in the Biden administration, are a drain on budgets. | ||
| You know, you hear that from people like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, that they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this. | ||
| There's federal money that's being spent. | ||
| It is interesting that you don't have anyone saying, hey, wait a minute, the mass deportations that the president is talking about will cut that expenditure, local, state, and federal, as people who are not here, who should not be here, are sent back home. | ||
| It is interesting that you don't have any Republican groups totaling that money up and saying this is a future budget savings that the president's policies will produce and is another advantage to the deportation policy, which, by the way, is an area where the president has strong approval, unlike the economy, is that people do polls do show that more people disapprove of his handling of inflation or the economy, but polls show that they largely approve of his deportation policy and his handling of immigration. | ||
| And that's one reason why his job approval rating is still high, is that there are many people who say, I don't like this, but I really like this. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| Henry Olson is the senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and also the host of the Beyond the Polls podcast. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me back, Kimberly. | |
| And up next, we're going to hear from Center for Election Innovation and Research founder David Becker, who's going to join us to discuss President Trump's executive order requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, journalist and musician Lee Hawkins, author of I Am Nobody's Slave, talks about the impact that slavery and Jim Crow have had on his family through multiple generations. | |
| Mr. Hawkins examines the relationship between the past violence experienced by family members, often at the hands of white people, and the way his parents raised and severely disciplined him. | ||
| All I knew growing up was that if I asked too many questions, if I said no to my parents, if I question any aspect of upbringing, and if I fell short of excellence, the price was going to be physical violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Journalist, musician, and author Lee Hawkins tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | |
| As a follow-on to Stuart Banner's History of the Supreme Court, this week's Book Notes Plus podcast features a 2002 interview with Dennis Hutchinson, a University of Chicago law professor emeritus. | ||
| The subject matter, forgotten memoir of John Knox, a law clerk to former Justice James McReynolds, a native of Kentucky. | ||
| Knox's year was the term beginning October 1936. | ||
| In history, it is very rare that a law clerk at the Supreme Court has published an insider's view of the court or of a justice. | ||
| Professor Hutchinson gives the background on where he found the memoir, which hadn't been published before. | ||
| Justice McReynolds, as you will hear, was, according to historians, arguably one of the most disagreeable justices ever to sit on the bench. | ||
|
unidentified
|
An interview with University of Chicago law professor Dennis Hutchinson on the forgotten memoir of John Knox on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are joined now by David Becker, who is the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, here to discuss the Trump agenda and some of the political news that we've been following. | ||
| Good morning and welcome to the Washington Journal. | ||
| Good morning, Kimberly. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the Center for Election Innovation and Research, what you all do, your mission, and how you're funded? | ||
| We are a nonpartisan nonprofit, 501c3. | ||
| We're based here in Washington, D.C., and we work with election officials all over the country, Republicans and Democrats, state officials and local officials, to make sure that the elections are accessible and trustworthy, make sure that their processes are working for them. | ||
| And so I talk to election officials all over the country all of the time. | ||
| We are funded primarily by major institutional grants, foundations like the Hewitt Foundation and others who fund our work and also the public to some degree who can make donations to us. | ||
| The President last week signed an executive order related to how elections are run. | ||
| Can you explain what exactly is in this order? | ||
| It's a very long executive order for an executive order. | ||
| It's about 10 plus pages long and it has several provisions that purport to require the states to do certain things with regard to elections. | ||
| It purports to require the states to require proof of citizenship and very specific types of proof of citizenship. | ||
| For instance, it mentions U.S. passports, but it doesn't mention U.S. birth certificates. | ||
| That's in contrast to a bill that's currently pending in Congress called the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship but would allow for birth certificates as well as passports. | ||
| It would require that mail ballots in all federal elections be received by no later than Election Day. | ||
| There are states where mail ballots are accepted a few days after Election Day if they were mailed prior to or on Election Day and received through the mail. | ||
| And those states are both red and blue. | ||
| There are states like California, Mississippi, and others that have had that ruling. | ||
| And then also really importantly, and I think this is often discussed a little bit less than some of the other provisions of the executive order, it dictates to the Independent Election Assistance Commission a standard that would apply to the certification of voting machines and would require that standard to be implemented, all voting machines everywhere in the United States to be decertified and then recertified to a new standard that doesn't even exist yet. | ||
| And that could require a lot of jurisdictions to replace their voting machines, which would cost likely hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. | ||
| And there's no funding attached to this executive order to do this. | ||
| The executive branch doesn't have the ability to provide funding. | ||
| Only Congress has the power of the purse. | ||
| And so if this executive order went into effect, it would be a vast unfunded mandate on the states. | ||
| Now, I should also say there are three to four cases pending right now alleging that this executive order is an overreach of executive power. | ||
| I think those cases are on very strong legal ground, and it's very likely there'll be some kind of injunction for most, if not all, of this executive order to be enjoined. | ||
| Now, just to be clear, because this is something that often comes up when the president talks about voting, can non-citizens vote in elections on local, state, or the federal level? | ||
| So local and state is a different issue. | ||
| The president would not have any power over that under any circumstances. | ||
| There are a few jurisdictions, a small number, that allow some non-citizens to vote in local elections, for instance, for school board, because their kids might be going to school there. | ||
| But for federal elections, it is the law passed by Congress and also, I think, in the Constitution that only citizens can vote in federal elections. | ||
| There was a law passed by Congress in 1996, 18 U.S.C. 611, that specifically outlaws, makes criminal a non-citizen voting in federal elections. | ||
| In addition, and this is often not understood by many, excuse me, every single registered voter has to provide ID when they register to vote in the United States. | ||
| That is under the Help America Vote Act. | ||
| It's been the law since 2002. | ||
| And every single voter has to provide a driver's license number or a Social Security number, which is then matched against those records to confirm their status, their eligibility to vote. | ||
| And then if they don't have that, they can provide a photo ID, or rather, some kind of identification at the polling place the first time they vote. | ||
| But every single voter has to do that. | ||
| Most of them provide driver's license numbers that are checked against motor vehicles records. | ||
| And do we have evidence of the cases of non-citizens voting getting to a higher level or increasing at all? | ||
| Certainly not increasing or getting to a higher level. | ||
| The incidence of non-citizen voting in this country are not zero, but they are close to zero. | ||
| States recently, Michigan did a complete audit of its voter lists. | ||
| They found a total of 15 possible non-citizens who voted in 2024. | ||
| Out of over 5 million votes. | ||
| Iowa did a similar assessment, found, I believe, around 35. | ||
| Georgia did a complete audit of its voter lists and found fewer than 10 over the course of about a dozen years. | ||
| Ohio did a complete assessment of their voter list and found about five that they could charge with non-citizen voting over the course of roughly 15 years. | ||
| So it doesn't happen very often. | ||
| If you talk to Democratic and Republican election officials, there's not a partisan difference on this. | ||
| They all want to keep non-citizens off the list. | ||
| And in fact, those that often find themselves on the list find themselves there by accident. | ||
| They didn't understand the forms. | ||
| They were offered an opportunity to register to vote when they shouldn't have been. | ||
| There was a data mix-up. | ||
| And it can put their legal status here in the United States at risk. | ||
| It's illegal for them to register to vote. | ||
| It's illegal for them to vote. | ||
| And if they're in the process of becoming a citizen, if they're here on a work visa or a study visa, it could put their status here at risk. | ||
| So pretty much everyone agrees we should do what we can to keep non-citizens off the list. | ||
| The problem is we also want to do it in a way that doesn't accidentally keep eligible citizens off the list at the same time. | ||
| You touched on this a bit earlier, but can you break down exactly what power the executive branch has over elections and voting compared to Congress and the states and how that may factor into what's in some of these executive orders? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution is called the Elections Clause. | ||
| Which we have a graphic of that so we can pull it up. | ||
| And what that says basically, I hope I'm paraphrasing it already. | ||
| I can actually read it for you. | ||
| It says, the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. | ||
| But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations except as to the places of choosing senators. | ||
| And that's in the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| And this is one of the more clear clauses of the United States Constitution. | ||
| States get to decide how to run their own elections. | ||
| That's been the law of the land since the Constitution was first adopted nearly, well, well over 200 years ago. | ||
| And we've accepted that over time. | ||
| Different states have different ways of running elections because their populations are different. | ||
| People in the West have adopted more male voting over time. | ||
| That's been true in both blue states like California and red states like Utah. | ||
| And people in the East have tended to vote more in person and more on election day. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| And this is usually due to population density and how far people are from each other. | ||
| And also somewhat due to tradition and culture. | ||
| I mean, there is just different states are different. | ||
| And the people in the states, and particularly the legislatures, know what their people want and how their people like to vote and how they feel comfortable voting. | ||
| And so this has been left up to the legislatures. | ||
| Now, as you see from the elections clause, Congress may regulate, and Congress at times has. | ||
| Congress did it with the Voting Rights Act in 1965. | ||
| It's regulated, for instance, rules regarding military voters in 1986 with a law called the Uniform and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. | ||
| It regulated after the Florida 2000 election with something called the Help America Vote Act, which got rid of punch card voting, for instance, and provided for funding for new systems and statewide voter registration databases. | ||
| Those are all situations where Congress has felt it's necessary to provide some standards across the states. | ||
| But you'll often hear people of both parties complain when even Congress tries to step in and pass a massive overhaul of elections. | ||
| In 2021, the Democrats, when they were in the majority, tried to pass H.R. 1, which would have been a very massive, significant overhaul of how elections are run in the United States. | ||
| And Republicans raised a lot of alarm about that, and I think credibly so, about the nature of that overreach with regard to elections in the states. | ||
| But at least that was Congress trying to do that. | ||
| The President does not have the power very clearly under the Elections Clause to change or dictate how states run elections with a swipe of a pen. | ||
| And yet the executive order threatens to withhold federal funding from state and local election offices that don't comply with these changes. | ||
| Could that happen? | ||
| Well, if this becomes law, and I'm skeptical that it will actually become enforceable, it's possible that, I mean, there are a couple of threats implied in this executive order. | ||
| One is the withholding of grant funds. | ||
| One is also the targeting of the states that refuse to do these things with DOJ investigations. | ||
| I think both are problematic. | ||
| But ultimately, we've got several cases right now challenging the legality of this executive order. | ||
| I think they're on pretty strong legal ground. | ||
| I think it's very unlikely that most of this, if not all of this executive order goes into law. | ||
| There have been some critics of the well actually let me ask about the SAVE Act first, because the SAVE Act is in the House of Representatives right now. | ||
| The House is scheduled to vote on it as soon as next week. | ||
| Can you remind viewers what that is? | ||
| And we have a little bit of a breakdown, but I'll let you talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, the SAVE Act is an act. | ||
| It was up in the last Congress as well that would require documentary proof of citizenship for all voter registrants going forward from the time of the act. | ||
| It would require things like a U.S. birth certificate, a passport to be shown whenever anyone makes a voter registration transaction, which might be not just an initial voter registration. | ||
| It might be when you move, when you change your name, you would go and conduct a voter registration transaction. | ||
| And at that point, proof of citizenship would be required. | ||
| This is controversial because there's some pretty strong evidence that there are people who have difficulty obtaining their proof of citizenship to show at various points in time. | ||
| And also important to note, as I mentioned, every time someone registers to vote, they already provide ID. | ||
| That ID can be checked against databases. | ||
| And with real ID in the United States, those people, when they go to motor vehicles agencies, are showing proof of their legal presence. | ||
| It might be citizenship proof, like a birth certificate or a passport. | ||
| It might be proof of legal presence, but non-citizenship, like a work visa or a green card. | ||
| But in any case, the government, the state agencies have information about what that citizen's citizenship status is or what that person's citizenship status is. | ||
| And in that case, it can be checked. | ||
| And so the question becomes, do you need to put this burden on voters when government could get its act together and do this job better by just sharing information between agencies that it already has? | ||
| But as you pointed out, at least Congress is doing this. | ||
| Congress does have the power to do this, whether it's good policy or not. | ||
| It's before the House of Representatives. | ||
| And if it passes the House of Representatives, which I think is expected, it would probably face a little more of an uphill climb in the Senate. | ||
| We're going to be taking your questions for Mr. Becker coming up. | ||
| Our Republican line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000 and Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to the calls, there have been some complaints from critics of the SAVE Act that it would make it difficult for a person who takes a spouse's last name after marriage to register to vote. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's quite possible. | ||
| I mean, if you look at how citizenship documents work and how ID works, often for many people in the United States, their ID, the name on their ID, does not match the name on their citizenship document. | ||
| Your citizenship document, if you're born in the United States, might date back to your birth. | ||
| And if you think, you know, there are many people in the United States who no longer have the name they held when they were born. | ||
| And so finding multiple documents, trying to demonstrate that to state officials, I think one of the important things also is that whether it's the executive order or the SAVE Act, they both would require the states to create a vast new bureaucracy that would cost millions of dollars. | ||
| They'd have to create a system for collecting this information, which would require training of thousands of state employees. | ||
| They'd have to create systems that could collect and store this information and make it retrievable to local election officials, which their systems might not be currently set up to do. | ||
| So there's a pretty high price tag on this as well. | ||
| And when those state employees are trying to enforce this act, if it passed, and there are states looking to pass this on a state basis as well, there might be issues with that difference between your citizenship documentation and what your ID currently shows, what name you currently use. | ||
| But I should be clear, there are some claims floating around on social media that the SAVE Act would make it impossible for people with different names on their documents to vote, but that's not true. | ||
| It's probably not true. | ||
| It would just make it very burdensome, depending on how difficult it is to get all of the documentation necessary. | ||
| I mean, if you changed your name through marriage, you might need to bring a marriage license in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know where my marriage license is at the current time. | |
| But it would be, I think impossible is too strong a word, but it might be extremely burdensome, especially when you consider the small number of non-citizens that are actually voting in this country and how well the states are already doing in keeping those non-citizens off the list and in prosecuting those rare cases when non-citizens do vote. | ||
| All right, let's get to your calls with our questions for Mr. Becker. | ||
| Bob is in Texas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, elections are a big topic here in Texas. | |
| My question is, has the Constitution been abated and the intent of our founders, given that the Constitution cannot be changed without amendment? | ||
| And our founders understood that Election Day is a single day of voting in the most minute of districts on paper by hand, counted in those minute districts that we call precincts and reported on the and by the people that live in those precincts. | ||
| So anyway, I'd love to get a good answer on that one. | ||
| Can you hang on, Bob, just in case David has any follow-up questions to clarify that, or do you understand what he says? | ||
| I think I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Thanks, Bob. | ||
| So the Constitution does mention Election Day. | ||
| It doesn't mention anything about precincts or how the elections should actually be run. | ||
| And the way we've interpreted that is that the vote has to be relinquished by Election Day. | ||
| So for instance, it's really important for military and overseas voters. | ||
| Often their ballots come in after Election Day, even when they voted. | ||
| They're often in far-off places serving our nation in many different ways. | ||
| And so we have said that with regard to Election Day, and this has been the law of the United States since before the Civil War, that as long as a ballot is relinquished, the voter cannot change their vote. | ||
| They can't cast a vote they wouldn't otherwise have cast by Election Day. | ||
| That counts. | ||
| We've had a recent appellate court ruling in Mississippi that would challenge that for the first time and says ballots must be received by Election Day. | ||
| That's a first of its kind. | ||
| It's somewhat unique. | ||
| I don't think it's likely to be accepted nationwide as Election Day has been interpreted to mean when the voter votes the vote, not when the election officials receive it, so long as they have no ability to change that vote. | ||
| It should also be noted that most states do require all ballots, even those that are mailed, to be received by Election Day. | ||
| There's a minority, some are red, some are blue, that allow them to come in a few days later. | ||
| And the states that generally do that, they have a lot of drop boxes because if someone has a mail ballot that they've left until the last minute and all of us procrastinate to some degree, it's good to have a place where they can drop that ballot off. | ||
| So if states want to move to Election Day receipt of ballots, which can be a perfectly good policy and the majority of states have that, it's also appropriate for them to move to more drop boxes so that people can get those ballots in by the deadline. | ||
| Linda is in Ogden, Utah on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| Henry Olson, you're one of my favorite. | ||
| So I'm sorry, Linda, but Henry Olson has already finished his segment. | ||
| We're here with David Becker, who's with the Center for Election Innovation and Research. | ||
| Did you maybe have a question for David about our elections? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm so sorry. | |
| David, I'm really sorry. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| So sorry about that. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Let's go to Victoria in Ohio on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Victoria. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I was wondering how often do we have a presidential election with felonies? | |
| I was just wondering if you can answer that question. | ||
| To my knowledge, President Trump was the first one to run with a felony conviction and the first one to win with a felony convictions. | ||
| It does happen very, very rarely, it appears. | ||
| You mentioned earlier the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is an agency many folks maybe don't know about. | ||
| Can you talk about what this organization is or what this commission is and how they're involved in these executive orders? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in 2002, when the Help America Vote Act was passed in the aftermath of the 2000 Florida election, the Election Assistance Commission was established. | ||
| It was meant to be an independent, bipartisan commission. | ||
| It has four commissioners, two Democrats, two Republicans, who are appointed by the majority and minority leaders in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. | ||
| And what they do is they set voluntary standards. | ||
| There's something called the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines that apply to how voting systems are certified in the United States. | ||
| Many states have adopted those voluntary voting systems guidelines. | ||
| They're very helpful for establishing standards. | ||
| They also serve as a clearinghouse for information. | ||
| They collect data from the states on elections and publish it. | ||
| They fund research and otherwise support election officials. | ||
| But this is an independent agency. | ||
| And one thing that's in the executive order, as I mentioned, is an attempt to direct the agency to do something very specific, which is to amend a very technical voluntary voting system guideline in a particular way. | ||
| A way, I should say, that was recently, where there was a court case recently in Georgia brought by left-leaning advocates seeking a similar challenge to how a voting system is working in Georgia, and it was rejected by the court there. | ||
| So it's probably unlikely that the president has the power to direct an independent agency established by Congress in this way, especially to do such a very, very specific thing, which would be to amend its voluntary voting systems guidelines in a short period of time with elections coming up relatively soon. | ||
| It was about 180 days by the order. | ||
| By the time it was done, we'd be around a year before the midterm elections in 2026. | ||
| It is very difficult, election officials will tell you, to make major changes to how elections are run with only a year to go before a major election. | ||
| And I understand the Election Assistance Commission is reviewing the executive order to determine next steps. | ||
| What power, if any, do they have in terms of pushing back against this? | ||
| Well, I don't know if they need to so much push back against this. | ||
| I mean, the question is whether they're going to just do what the president orders or whether they are going to independently exercise their discretion as authorized by Congress to determine what the right thing to do is here. | ||
| It should also be noted that there are four members, as I mentioned, two Democrats, two Republicans. | ||
| In order for them to move forward on anything, they have to have three votes. | ||
| So it needs to be bipartisan. | ||
| So the question is whether they can get three votes to do anything here. | ||
| Lynn is in Bloomington, Indiana on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lynn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Lynn, can I ask you to turn down your TV and then go ahead with your question, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm so sorry. | |
| No problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just a second. | |
| Yes, I moved from Zero Beach, Florida, back to Indiana three years ago, and it took me one year to get my new driver's license with the Gold Star. | ||
| The state of Indiana has already put in place what the president is asking for. | ||
| And it cost me $1,000 by the time I hired an attorney, but before the local judge to verify I am who I am. | ||
| And I was born with a beautiful family name that was 100 years old, and I had to lose it. | ||
| I had all my documentation, but the state of Indiana first turned me down because there was not an E at my middle name, Lynn. | ||
| And I had all my divorce papers and everything they required. | ||
| And I still had to go back and see Social Security. | ||
| I ran around for six months before I hired an attorney to please straighten this out. | ||
| And it was really, I felt like I had been a person that swam across the Rio Grande to become a person. | ||
| Lynn, if I can ask, how many elections did you miss voting in because of all those problems? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't miss it. | |
| I was able to get it before this last presidential election of 2024. | ||
| I got my license six months before that election. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it took me a year because Indiana has already changed their law and they put me through all this. | ||
| And I resent it terribly because I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and 35 miles from Bloomington. | ||
| And yet, if it's happening to me, it's happening to a lot of other legal citizens of America. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Lynn brings up a really poignant example of how these things actually play out and work in the states. | ||
| No one should wait a year for an ID. | ||
| No one should have to hire a lawyer to prove they are who they say they are and get basic government services like an identification or being registered to vote. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| And we're talking about providing additional requirements and potential burdens on individual citizens to do this. | ||
| So we really have to assess, is this really necessary? | ||
| How big is the problem it's trying to solve? | ||
| Does it solve the problem? | ||
| If you ask Republican and Democratic election officials all over the country, they want to have the conversation about how to reduce the number of non-citizens on the voter list from nearly zero to zero. | ||
| They want to have that conversation. | ||
| They would love to talk about how federal resources might be able to help them. | ||
| What they don't want to talk about, and this is really bipartisan, they don't really want to talk about solutions that put more burdens on their citizens. | ||
| They are trying to figure out ways to make government work for their voters, for their citizens. | ||
| And if they can do so with additional resources from the federal government, perhaps additional funding, their access to databases that might be helpful to them, that would be really helpful. | ||
| But to put this all on the individual citizen to say, you're going to have to wait a year for an ID. | ||
| You're going to have to hire a lawyer to prove you are who you say you are just so you can exercise your most fundamental right as an American citizen, the right to vote, that's probably a little too much. | ||
| Neil is in Fountain Inn, South Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Neil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm really enjoying listening to your conversation this morning. | ||
| I want to try to make two points. | ||
| My first point is, why are we, when we talk about fall waste and abuse, let's talk about waste. | ||
| If you have a problem that does not exist to any level that really matters, because David just said, very few, very few illegal immigrants vote, and there's a reason why they don't. | ||
| They don't even attempt to. | ||
| So why are we pretending that we need to solve a problem that doesn't exist? | ||
| The second thing is it is clear through all of the actions that were taken over the last four to six years that the goal is to scrub the voter roles so that certain demographics cannot vote. | ||
| So we're having politicians elect their voters. | ||
| It's not the voters electing the politicians. | ||
| So why do we not connect these dots? | ||
| And my last point is Citizens United legislation was passed for one reason and one reason only, to give power to corporations to decide who gets elected. | ||
| So why do we not have a more holistic conversation around this topic as opposed to, well, we need to pass laws and we're going to pass these laws to get those illegals off the voting rolls. | ||
| This is BS. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I thank you for taking my call and I really enjoy listening to your show almost every Sunday morning. | ||
| So I think Neil is quite right. | ||
| I mean, this is probably not a problem that should be prioritized. | ||
| It's a very, it occurs extremely rarely. | ||
| And again, I work with the election officials, the professionals, Republicans and Democrats all over the country who run elections. | ||
| When legislatures at the state level, when Congress, when the president are considering how to change our elections, they wish they would listen to the election officials a little more to talk to them about what they really need, what the problems really are, where there are concerns. | ||
| They want transparent, secure, accessible elections, and they've succeeded to a large degree. | ||
| Our last two presidential elections were the highest turnout presidential elections in American history. | ||
| Our midterm election in 2022 and 2018 were two of the highest midterm election turnouts in American history. | ||
| The seven swing states in 2024 saw their highest turnouts in American history, even higher than their 2020 turnouts. | ||
| And those are all very good things. | ||
| We're largely successful. | ||
| The 2020 and 24 elections, despite rampant disinformation, despite false claims about those elections, have withstood every single bit of scrutiny that has been applied, whether by the courts or by anyone else, every single time the work of election officials has been held up. | ||
| So I think it is clear that there are some politics at play. | ||
| Both parties do this to some degree. | ||
| They try to pass election policy that would benefit their party. | ||
| It isn't the right thing to do, but it also rarely works. | ||
| The American voter is very complex. | ||
| There are people in North Carolina that voted for the Democrat for governor and the Republican for president. | ||
| In Arizona, the Democrat for senator, the Republican for president, same in Michigan. | ||
| This happens because voters are complex and they vote for a variety of reasons, and we should stop trying to kind of game the system by putting our thumb on the scale one way or the other. | ||
| You mentioned North Carolina. | ||
| There's a case there that's really interesting. | ||
| And here's a story in the Associated Press that North Carolina judges side with a Republican colleague in close Supreme Court election. | ||
| This is a story from April 4th. | ||
| A North Carolina appeals court cited Friday with a trailing Republican candidate in an extremely close state Supreme Court election, a ruling that could flip the result of the nation's only 2024 race that is still undecided. | ||
| Can you talk about this case, why it's important, and what this kind of tells us about how elections are run? | ||
| Yeah, this is an unprecedented and somewhat shocking decision, the very divided decision, two to one, by a North Carolina appellate court. | ||
| What happened in this case is the incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs beat her challenger, Judge Griffin, by 734 votes in the November 5th election. | ||
| That election was recounted, and the margin of victory after the recount was once again exactly 734 votes. | ||
| What a remarkable job by the election officials in the 100 counties in North Carolina, many of whom had to deal with the aftermath of a hurricane, to have an election that stood up to such scrutiny. | ||
| But Judge Griffin then complained that there were records of voters that had not checked all the boxes that were administratively required. | ||
| So for instance, they didn't have an ID number associated, a driver's license number associated with their driver's license number. | ||
| It's likely that almost all of them, if not all of them, provided it. | ||
| It might just not have been stored in the database. | ||
| He questioned whether there were military voters who had not provided ID when they voted. | ||
| These are people serving our nation overseas who were told ahead of time by election officials under the laws interpreted at the time of the election, they didn't need to provide that. | ||
| All of these things were the law of the land at the time these voters voted, and they followed that law exactly. | ||
| It should also be noted that the North Carolina voter files are public. | ||
| Guaranteed all the candidates had the voter files well before the election. | ||
| In fact, North Carolina is one of the few states that publishes them on the internet. | ||
| So anyone can see these voter files. | ||
| So if any candidate has a problem with a voter's record and wants to challenge that voter, under North Carolina law, they have ample opportunity to do so before the election. | ||
| They shouldn't wait until after the election and see whether or not they won or lost. | ||
| This is the first election in U.S. history where a court has applied rules that didn't apply on election day to voters and possibly disenfranchise them. | ||
| And I thought the most notable commentary on this was from Ben Ginsburg, who is former counsel to President George W. Bush and oversaw the Florida recount in 2000. | ||
| He wrote a piece on this and had talked about the appellate court decision and really noted how unusual it was and how Judge Griffin was trying to do the same thing that he thought Vice President Gore was trying to do in 2000, which was picking the voters that he wanted to challenge in certain areas and not in other areas, trying to game the system in some way. | ||
| And Ben Ginsburg, I think, appropriately said this was unprecedented. | ||
| So what happens now in this case? | ||
| Well, we'll have to see. | ||
| Supreme Court Justice Riggs, who has recused herself from this case on the Supreme Court, so she's not listening to this case on this particular issue. | ||
| She is still sitting on the court otherwise, however, while this is pending, she is appealing, she has said, to the Supreme Court on this issue. | ||
| This decision has been remanded back down to the trial court, and there may be, according to this ruling, if it stands, and I'm not sure that it will, notice will have to be sent out to about 65,000 voters in North Carolina, people who have been voting in North Carolina for years, for decades, requiring them to show proof of identity or something else that they probably have already shown multiple times or their ballot could be thrown out and they could be disenfranchised. | ||
| Let's get back to your calls. | ||
| Brandy is in Indianapolis, Indiana, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Brandy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| My, I guess, comment question is, when my husband died, we went to vote and the name was still on the voter list. | ||
| We explained the situation, but of course, no documentation or anything at the time, so it was left on the list. | ||
| Now, when we went back this past time, it was gone. | ||
| I guess I was under the assumption, you know, when you die, just your Social Security number and all that other thing stops. | ||
| So, and I had seen things on TV, but, you know, didn't really think that they were so true that dead people were voting. | ||
| So what kind of, I guess, purge or whatever they can do every year, every two years to prevent things like this, just even them getting on the list? | ||
| Yeah, thanks, Brandy. | ||
| I mean, that's a really good question, how voter lists work. | ||
| Voter lists aren't magic. | ||
| So when someone dies or when they move, election officials don't magically get that information. | ||
| They get information from a variety of sources and they try to match it to their voter list. | ||
| And that can be challenging. | ||
| You can imagine if your name was John Lee or Sean O'Hara, how you want to make darn sure that you have the right person because election officials want to remove people who have passed away from the voter list, but they also don't want to accidentally remove someone who has not passed away from the voter list. | ||
| So they want to make sure they have adequate information. | ||
| So there's often a little bit of a time lag. | ||
| And election officials have the ability to go back and see if anyone who had passed away had voted. | ||
| Almost always what has happened is it is a spouse voting for a recently deceased spouse and casting their ballot in a way that they were sure that they should cast it. | ||
| That's not legal. | ||
| Sometimes it's someone who filled out a mail ballot. | ||
| Well, I was going to say, sometimes it's someone who fills out a mail ballot, puts it in the mail, gives it to election officials, and passes away before election day. | ||
| And under state law, sometimes that counts, sometimes it doesn't. | ||
| And in very rare cases, it's fraud. | ||
| And election officials can find that the numbers are similar to what I mentioned for non-citizen voting. | ||
| Georgia did a complete study of this. | ||
| I think they found about four people who had voted, and they were all not intentional fraud. | ||
| It was people who had recently passed away. | ||
| Brandy, if you don't mind me asking, what was the time difference between when your husband passed and when you went to vote and saw his name on the rolls? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Five months. | |
| Five months. | ||
| Yeah, that's not unusual. | ||
| Again, getting the data from Social Security and being able to match it takes some time. | ||
| There is a tool that half the states use that helps them do this. | ||
| It's called the Electronic Registration Information Center. | ||
| It's run by the states themselves. | ||
| It's a bipartisan tool where they take data from the Social Security Administration. | ||
| They take data from their own state records and they match it all together using sophisticated software and it's highly accurate. | ||
| That helps them keep their voter lists up to date. | ||
| Hopefully more states will join so they'll be able to do this even better. | ||
| But Brandy, you're quite right. | ||
| It's important that states have tools necessary, even though it's rarely resulting in fraud. | ||
| It's good to have accurate voter lists that reflect the electorate at the time. | ||
| And anything that can give election officials the tools to do that better is a good thing. | ||
| President Trump has said he's planning to take more actions related to elections in the coming weeks. | ||
| What are you watching for? | ||
| It's very hard to guess what's going to happen in the future. | ||
| I mean, we've got enough to deal with as it is right now. | ||
| I don't know what we're going to see. | ||
| You know, in Congress, we've got the SAVE Act that's pending. | ||
| We'll see what's happening there. | ||
| I'm not going to try to divine what the White House might be doing at any point in time. | ||
| I know what's happening in the states right now, which is that the state legislatures are considering a variety of different election policy as the Constitution directs them that they have the power to do. | ||
| Some are passing, some are not. | ||
| Georgia's session just ended on Friday. | ||
| Election officials are preparing for the next election. | ||
| And that next election, in most cases, is not November of 2026. | ||
| We just had major elections in Florida and Wisconsin last week. | ||
| We have major elections coming up throughout 2025. | ||
| There's a major statewide election in Virginia, including a governor's election in November of 2025 in Virginia. | ||
| And then we're going to be right into the primaries for Congress in 2026. | ||
| And so out in the states right now, the election officials are working. | ||
| What I'd say to everyone listening right now, if you run into your election officials, thank them. | ||
| And if you get a chance, and especially if you have any doubts about how elections are run, volunteer to be a poll worker. | ||
| Go through the training, serve your community, and meet your citizens as they come in to vote. | ||
| And you'll learn about all of the checks and balances we have in place to make sure our elections are secure and transparent. | ||
| We have a follow-up question about that North Carolina case from Connie in Parker, Colorado. | ||
| When this North Carolina judge reviewed the ballots, did they look at any Republican ballots or were they all Democrats? | ||
| I'm guessing this is in reference to the ballots that are desired to be reviewed. | ||
| So first of all, they didn't look at any ballots. | ||
| There is no ballot review here. | ||
| In the five months since the November election, Judge Griffin and his counsel have not presented evidence about a single ballot that was illegally cast, not one. | ||
| This is all based on administrative records and whether they jumped through all the hoops and whether the database stored the information. | ||
| So no ballots are reviewed. | ||
| This is just ballot records, and this is just based on those that were challenged by Judge Griffin. | ||
| But if this court's ruling stands, I would expect Judge Justice Riggs, I would expect other candidates in elections to just challenge everybody after the election. | ||
| We will see elections that are almost never final. | ||
| We will see doubt about the elections all the time. | ||
| And that is why every court up until now has said, listen, if you have a legitimate concern about the election and that concern was based on the voter files, bring it before the election. | ||
| We can resolve it before the election. | ||
| If someone gets challenged, right or wrong, they can come into court. | ||
| They can prove their case. | ||
| They can vote or not vote depending upon what's appropriate. | ||
| If you have a challenge based on how the election was actually conducted and whether it was in accordance with state law, that can be reviewed as well. | ||
| That, you know, for instance, the Florida 2000 election is a classic example. | ||
| But otherwise, voters have rules that they expect to follow on election day. | ||
| And if they follow those rules, we are going to count their ballots. | ||
| This is the first case that said otherwise. | ||
| So we'll see how that turns out. | ||
| Bradley is in Marietta, Georgia, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Bradley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| In the state of Georgia, when you first get your driver's license, you sign the card or whatever. | ||
| By name's Bradley Haynes, whatever. | ||
| And then that is the driver's license, or that is the signature that they're matching, I guess, even now. | ||
| And not only has my signature changed throughout the years, but like, honestly, I signed different ways almost every time, not even meaning to. | ||
| I think there needs to be more scrutiny put to especially how Republicans are going to, you are using the signature match to throw out votes. | ||
| And I just wanted to hear your opinion on that. | ||
| Yeah, Georgia is actually a really interesting state. | ||
| Georgia is one of the few states, Minnesota is another, that moved away from signature matching. | ||
| And now, if you're voting by mail in Georgia, and fewer than 10% of Georgians vote by mail. | ||
| It is not a heavy mail-voting state like a lot of states in the West, but they still, Georgia offers easy mail voting if you want to vote by mail, a lot of early in-person voting and election day voting. | ||
| And in Georgia now, if you vote by mail, you put your driver's license number on the envelope, and that is what is checked. | ||
| And that's going to be a, I think, you know, what Georgia has found is it's a lot more certain check against the record, and it's easier for election officials to do as well because they don't have to be experts on signature matching. | ||
| So Georgia is one of those states that has tried to move away from some of these signature issues. | ||
| And if you, again, if you talk to election officials as I do, they recognize that this is one of the few places where we still use signatures to match. | ||
| That said, they do a remarkable job. | ||
| And in most places, if it doesn't match almost all of the places, they will contact the voter and say, we have a problem with your signature. | ||
| Can you come in and what's called cure the ballot and make sure that your ballot is going to be counted? | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| David Becker is the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. | ||
| Also, the co-author of the book, The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us on Washington Journal. | ||
| And thank you to everybody who called in this segment. | ||
| We are going to hear more of your thoughts on politics and news of the day in an open forum coming up next. | ||
| So you can start dialing in now. | ||
| Our number for Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| For Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in an open forum, ready to hear your thoughts and comments. | ||
| We're going to start with Darryl in Omaha, Nebraska on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Darrell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, there's a documentary out by Greg Palas where he talks about these, I think Klan members challenging these votes at the elections. | |
| Is there any, do you know about that? | ||
| Is there any truth to that? | ||
| I don't know about this, excuse me, this documentary. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's put out by Greg Palas, Vigilante Incorporated or something. | |
| Okay, well, did you have any other comments that you wanted to share or your own thoughts about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I just wanted to verify: is it true or not? | |
| Does he know anything about that? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You said it's by whom again? | ||
| Oh, we've lost them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Jesus is in Claiborne, Texas on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning, Jesus. | ||
| This is Kimberly. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I'm from Cleburne, Texas. | |
| Cleburne, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, all I got to say is I don't see why they say that President Trump is a criminal when he's not. | |
| And I don't see why the Democrats keep on lying because they keep on lying. | ||
| Every one of them that lies there deserves to be in jail because they're nothing but liars, okay? | ||
| I'm just telling the truth, what I see on TV every day. | ||
| And all then, like that, Mrs. Crockett lady, she's supposed to be arrested because she says that's a terrific threat, you know, every time she talks. | ||
| So she should be put in jail. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| James is in Mobile, Alabama, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to make a comment about the law that was passed in Alabama, SB1. | ||
| And I don't think a lot of people are familiar with it outside of Alabama. | ||
| But I just wanted to make the comment that it was a very restrictive law. | ||
| And I want to know if anybody has been prosecuted in the state of Alabama under SB1. | ||
| And that's my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So I don't know about whether or not anyone has been prosecuted, but I do see the Campaign Legal Center put out a status update on this back in September of 2024 and said Alabama enacted a law that, according to this group, severely limits the ability of third parties to assist voters with absentee ballot applications, threatening those third parties with criminal liability for their assistance. | ||
| The Campaign Legal Center, SPLC, ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, and ADAP represent several organizations who assist voters with absentee ballot applications and are challenging what they refer to as a vague and punitive law. | ||
| Let's go to James in North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Ever since I've been voting in this country, you still didn't have to worry about voter ID. | ||
| You just went and voted. | ||
| You register and you voted. | ||
| You prove who you are, you vote. | ||
| Now, ever since the Republican Party have taken charges in certain states, in particular North Carolina, the voting system hasn't been fair for the last 15, 16 years because of jury mandate. | ||
| And every election that we have had seemed like it was always a Republican that was violating the law. | ||
| They lie, they cheat, and they steal. | ||
| So, James. | ||
| We were just talking in the last segment about the Supreme Court race in North Carolina. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that issue? | ||
| Are you following that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I am. | |
| Matter of fact, I joined in with hands-off rally yesterday here in Greenville, North Carolina. | ||
| And every challenge of an elected official being elected, it always been Republicans that deny they voted. | ||
| And not only do they deny, people vote. | ||
| The laws have been passed here in North Carolina to keep people from voting, mainly black people. | ||
| Peter is in Nagani, Michigan on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Peter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you this morning? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| I'm glad you let me in today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The only thing I'm calling vote of anything is this voter stuff, which is no problem. | ||
| But since I've been a voter and I've always had to show be registered, show my ID, and there was none of that crap, absentee stuff. | ||
| The absentee should only be for military service overseas. | ||
| And let's get back to basics. | ||
| Register and show a voter or a pictured ID. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Registered and pictured ID. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Cindy is in Austin, Texas, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Cindy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First, I need to comment on what the guy from Michigan just said. | ||
| Sir, you sound like you're maybe kind of elderly. | ||
| There are millions more people in this country than there were back in the day when you probably started voting with no absentee ballots. | ||
| Do you have any idea how long it would take to count ballots if everybody had to go in person and stand in line? | ||
| That's not my comment, though. | ||
| My comment is, number one, Kimberly, I hear you on a lot of different places I get my media from. | ||
| I'm a marketplace listener. | ||
| I listen every single day to that show. | ||
| And I also listen to the BBC every day. | ||
| And I hear you there as well. | ||
| But my comment is about how you started the show today, which is Elon Musk. | ||
| And what I want to say under Open Forum is Forbes came out with their billionaires list about five, six days ago. | ||
| And Elon Musk is on top. | ||
| $342 billion is what they estimate his worth at. | ||
| That, for the folks who don't know what that means, 342 and 9 zeros. | ||
| So I heard a bit about what Maxwell Frost said yesterday at the rally, and I thought that he was doing a good job trying to drive home the point of how many people listening to this show could combine all of our bank accounts and assets and 401ks and still not come up with a figure with nine zeros after it. | ||
| The media needs to pay more attention to this. | ||
| I believe the Forbes article said that there were 900 billionaires in the United States now. | ||
| I think it's China is next with like 700 billion. | ||
| Give me a moment. | ||
| I'll actually read from that Forbes article that you're highlighting. | ||
| The U.S. has a record 902 billionaires, followed by China with 516, including Hong Kong, and India with 205. | ||
| And Forbes used stock prices and exchange rates from March 7th of 2025. | ||
| And right. | ||
| So that's you were citing accurate numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, that's exactly what I was pointing out. | |
| So, people in this country, the low IQ thinkers of this country who want to complain about welfare or social security, I also heard a report yesterday, social security beneficiaries are now getting three times what they actually paid in back in the day. | ||
| People need to point the arrow where it belongs, and that is that people who have so much wealth, they and their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will never be able to spend it all. | ||
| That's where the target needs to be. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Beverly is in Milford, Connecticut, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Beverly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I just have a couple of things to say. | ||
| First of all, on the tariffs, most, I shouldn't say most, an awful lot of us are on a CPAP machine and an oxygen concentrator. | ||
| And lo and behold, most of the supplies come from China and are paid by Medicare. | ||
| So these tariffs will certainly impact Medicare. | ||
| So on one hand, they're increasing costs on these supplies coming from China, and then they want to take things away from Medicare. | ||
| That makes no sense. | ||
| You can't have it both ways. | ||
| You can't make Medicare pay more because of the tariffs and then start cutting Medicare. | ||
| And the last thing I want to say is on absentee ballots. | ||
| A lot of states, Connecticut being one of them, we do every possible thing that you can do to make sure an absentee ballot is never received by a non-U.S. resident. | ||
| So, you know, they need to stop this nonsense. | ||
| They need to start telling the facts. | ||
| But most of these people in Congress don't bother to do the facts, but take an awful lot of money from outsiders. | ||
| And Musk being one of them. | ||
| If he had so much money, why doesn't he pay down the deficit? | ||
| And we didn't elect him. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Ray is in Aurora, Colorado, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I'm affiliated with the Libertarian Party, and I am very much opposed to these so-called reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| This is just another form of revenue collection for the government. | ||
| I think alternative solutions to address the kind of job, you know, the manufacturing issues to the extent that we have any, I think we should look elsewhere. | ||
| One good place would be to focus at the state and local levels. | ||
| We've had ballot initiatives over the years about increases in the minimum wage, $15, $20. | ||
| We also have what's another well, also, I think we should concentrate our energy at particularly at the local level because you have all these zoning regulations and you have all these zoning areas that if we participate more at the local level, we may be able to have more of a voice. | ||
| And then there's also the issue of right to work states. | ||
| Not all of them are, so heavy union involvement. | ||
| I think we should look elsewhere for solutions as opposed to just putting tariff after tariff after tariff. | ||
| Ray mentioned that he's a libertarian. | ||
| The libertarian think tank Cato Institute has also come out pretty strongly in opposition to some of these tariffs, saying in a piece on their website, on its face, the pursuit of tariff reciprocity may seem a common sense approach, although not exactly the golden rule. | ||
| It seems darn close. | ||
| Why not give U.S. trading partners a taste of their own medicine? | ||
| But the seductive logic of reciprocity falls apart upon even cursory examination. | ||
| Tariffs are a costly and inefficient tax, usually borne by the importing country's consumers. | ||
| Why should the United States follow suit if other countries are so foolish as to increase those taxes? | ||
| Furthermore, there's no guarantee such a high-pressure approach will prompt U.S. trading partners to change their policies, and history argues the opposite. | ||
| What has been accomplished if the United States inflicts economic damage to itself while foreigners stand pat or, as is often the case, retaliate? | ||
| Let's go back to your calls and open forum. | ||
| Dave is in Las Vegas, Nevada, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| First of all, Trump shouldn't be in office. | ||
| He's a felon. | ||
| He was convicted of 34 counts of fraud. | ||
| And he's leading, he's protecting our money. | ||
| He should not be in office. | ||
| This guy is a criminal. | ||
| He's hurting the United States. | ||
| The first year he was in, the economy was good. | ||
| When he had his first term, the economy was great. | ||
| Time he left, when it took him four years to sink the economy. | ||
| We lost $6 trillion. | ||
| Now, in three months' time, we've lost $6 trillion because of him. | ||
| People are losing their jobs. | ||
| He doesn't care about the American people. | ||
| This guy is a cruel, bad person. | ||
| This guy sexually assaulted, allegedly, 26 women and convicted of one. | ||
| What's wrong with the American people? | ||
| You can't put the fox in the hen house and inspect them not to eat the chicken. | ||
| He's going to bring, he's ruining this country. | ||
| He has no morals. | ||
| He took the food from kids in sedan that had nothing. | ||
| They had the food going there and he stopped it. | ||
| Him, Musk, and Johnson. | ||
| You talk about religion and you talk about kids and stuff. | ||
| They're starving. | ||
| They starve kids to death and they die. | ||
| This guy is a monster. | ||
| Donald Trump is a monster. | ||
| If he stays in office, our country is going to fail. | ||
| So I don't know how to get him out of there. | ||
| He says, Trump says when he went in office, if you want to save the country, this is his words, you got to do violence, people. | ||
| I say you shouldn't do that. | ||
| But that's what he just said the other day. | ||
| He said that's the time when he went in office. | ||
| There's something wrong with this guy. | ||
| He's mentally. | ||
| I think we have your idea, Dave. | ||
| Let's go to Lori in Mashpee, Massachusetts on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So I just want to say I did do the hands-off rally yesterday on Cape Cod. | ||
| It was wonderful. | ||
| You know, it did definitely make me get rid of some of my anxiety a little bit just to see a lot of people who are feeling as anxious as I am about what's going on in our country, which pretty much feels like a train wreck running through it. | ||
| But let's not all be, you know, let's not be fooled by all of this. | ||
| I mean, a lot of this really is just the Republican agenda, which has been for decades and decades. | ||
| I mean, it's all about really cutting tax cuts to the wealthiest people. | ||
| I mean, it's the same plaint book that they've had for years. | ||
| Yes, they're using Elon Musk. | ||
| He's the new poster boy for it, but they're just doing what they set out to do. | ||
| Some of the other things that they're doing, though, as far as civil rights and all that is scary. | ||
| But I just wanted to say, too, let's not forget that there are billionaires on both sides of the aisle here. | ||
| And Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg, spent millions of dollars to take down Bernie Sanders during his run as president. | ||
| I believe Sanders had gotten in, we would have had a different world altogether. | ||
| He would have done a lot more to help the working class in this country. | ||
| We do have a Democratic Party that if it doesn't change and we don't get some more I call progressive people, you know, like Schumer has been there way too long, really. | ||
| I think he's just too entrenched. | ||
| You know, if they don't change it, it's not going to change, period. | ||
| It can't just be all the little people standing out protesting. | ||
| There has to be some changes within the party. | ||
| Thank you so much for your time. | ||
| Rebecca is in Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rebecca. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I just want to say, you know, there's so much hatred towards Elon Musk, and he has gone in with Doge and has truly saved this country billions of dollars, all this fraud, all this waste. | ||
| I don't want to fund other countries so they can watch, I don't know, the Sesame Street. | ||
| That's on a very low level to me. | ||
| I also don't want our country funding comic books that have to do with lesbians and just, you know, sexual preferences that should be private or they shouldn't be even brought up in schools. | ||
| And I don't understand Democrats who are saying that, you know, Elon is a monster. | ||
| He's a hero. | ||
| He's going in and saving our country billions of dollars. | ||
| And there's just the Democratic Party is so fueled by hatred right now. | ||
| And I think they need to change. | ||
| I think we need both Republican and Democrats. | ||
| And I don't think the Democrats know where they're going right now. | ||
| So they need a new brand. | ||
| And, you know, this is all part of our checks and balances in this country. | ||
| And basically, that's just what I wanted to say. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, next up is Karen in Nebraska on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Karen. | ||
| Hi there, Karen. | ||
| You can go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you hear me? | |
| Yes, we can hear you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I have a strange request, but I, or maybe it's a big favor. | ||
| Do you think that C-SPAN when they show pictures of the president or video of the president, if they could at least cut him in half? | ||
| Noted, but I doubt we're going to do that. | ||
| Let's move on to Deborah in Trenton, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Deborah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have a lot to say, but the first thing I heard from the last person you interview, the felony. | ||
| If President Trump was the first felon that won office, why not all felons be able to vote? | ||
| That's one thing I'm thinking about. | ||
| Number two, vote in your birth state. | ||
| It may be costly, but if you were born at a certain state, should we all go back to our birth state to vote so they know that's where we were born? | ||
| Keep hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and my So Security. | ||
| I work too long for my Social Security, and rent is through the roof, and food is through the roof. | ||
| Keep off of Medicare, Medicare, and Social Security. | ||
| And stop telling us you want to buy the Trump administration executive Gaza, Greenland, Canada, Mexico. | ||
| That's not taking care of us middle-class people, working people, and senior citizens. | ||
| There are cities like Trenton and Philadelphia with neighborhoods that need to be torn down and rebuilt. | ||
| We need housing. | ||
| We need places for the homeless and not living in the libraries, in the train stations, and taking baths in public bathrooms. | ||
| So all that I need to say now is billionaires, okay. | ||
| They create jobs and they pay us. | ||
| But keep your hands off of working class, middle class, senior citizens, Medicare, Social Security. | ||
| And the final thing is, this is not a two-party country. | ||
| It's really a four-party country. | ||
| You have the Republicans, you have the Democrats, and you have people like me, independent, watching what's going on, and it's a circus. | ||
| And the fourth party are the people who don't vote. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's hear from Mike in Salisbury, Massachusetts on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| What's your comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I just want to know why everyone wants to blame the tariffs or the interest rate going up when you could bring a car to a shop. | |
| And if you look at the mock-up prices on the parts they do there, they already have the tariffs already mocked up on automobile parts when you go to a garage or anything. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And everyone's blaming Trump and Elon, but they're causing more diversity because I went through one of those rallies yesterday and I got fingers and I got sworn at and I got spit on. | |
| It just doesn't make sense why everyone wants to cause war. | ||
| That sounds like a really bad experience you had at that rally. | ||
| Why do you think that happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I was flying the American flag in Ainsbury, Massachusetts, and they just didn't like it and they just don't like Trump, I guess. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's go to Rebecca in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Rebecca. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I guess my comment would be: why aren't the supporters of the current president wondering why when he has put tariffs on every piece of property on this planet except Russia? | ||
| The United States exports only $73 million And product to Russia, and we import $3 billion in Russian products. | ||
| So it's about the same ratio as everyone else. | ||
| But Russia has no tariffs put on their products. | ||
| My theory is he plans on putting the world broke and Russia is going to take over Europe and any other countries they want while they're in economic turmoil. | ||
| If the entire world is going to be tariffed, I think Russia should be included. | ||
| And I think people should wonder why they are not. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| James is in Atlanta, Georgia, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Just a couple of broad comments. | ||
| First, the issue that I see is two principal ones. | ||
| First, the Congress of the United States has not, both the House and the Senate have not sat under either party for 30 plus years. | ||
| I hear all this complaining about the number of district courts the courts did not create themselves. | ||
| The Congress of the United States created that system of courts below the Supreme Court, which was created in the Constitution. | ||
| Second, decision-making. | ||
| A lot of leadership books tell you that you can come out with decisions about any problem that the decision has integrity. | ||
| It has strength if you have a thoughtful process going through. | ||
| In this particular administration, we don't have thoughtful processes by thoughtful, mature people. | ||
| We seem to have knee-jerk reactions. | ||
| An example, the national security team using an open source, unsecure chat box app that you and I can put on our phones. | ||
| You don't have to be classified to understand with a mature, thoughtful head that you're dealing with sensitive information that others should not deal with, but we don't do that. | ||
| And then we get these announcements out of the White House, breaking news, tariffs. | ||
| What do the tariffs look like? | ||
| They look like a group of kindergartners wrote it across five different slate pages and arrived at some unique formula and no explanation. | ||
| Have you heard any news about meetings of nationally acclaimed economists, etc., advising and then coming up with a strategy? | ||
| No, none of that. | ||
| So in order for us to retain our balance and integrity regarding all things, we need to start having some maturity, not just experience, but maturity, thoughtful heads in our government, in the Congress, and in the White House. | ||
| The last example I'll provide, it falls under the radar screen because we all take our security for granted. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, thank you, James, for your comment, and thanks to everyone who called in for Open Forum and the rest of the show. | ||
| That's it for Washington Journal. | ||
| Today, we're going to be back with another edition of the show tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| hope you'll join us and have a great rest of your day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | |
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